Trading true love for violence and manipulation is a dangerous game, but what can a girl do when she's eighteen and already committed the worst of sins?
Deleilah Hanover leaves an affluent and destructive marriage, losing her entitlement to half the international corporation she helped her husband build. Broken by circumstance and shunned by the elite Auckland social set, she hides in a rural town to lick her physical and emotional wounds. Harvey Gilroy offers a shoulder to cry on and Deleilah makes the grave mistake of trusting him as she journeys to his farm for what she thinks is a holiday.
Desperate and running from violence for the second time in her life, Deleilah meets someone from her past and is drawn back to the tiny tourist town of her childhood in the foothills of Mount Pirongia. Just passing through, she is forced to face the demons of her teenage years and make amends for her abandonment of family and friends two decades earlier.
But things are not as they seem and Deleilah guards the truth about her sudden departure, not even sharing the reason for it with her three childhood friends. The foreigner, the fat kid and the foster boy have grown into a banker, a police officer and a horse whisperer. One of them holds the key to Deleilah's terrible secret and the day of reckoning will end in disaster.