"Charlotte Dawes was only fourteen when it happened. The terrifying ordeal would rob her of her childhood innocence and haunt her for the rest of her life. Years afterward, she would remember it with fear and loathing, with pain that could be banished only by her work - as a gifted architect building a new world for others as she conceals her own." "For the Dawes family, once factory owners and prime employers in the New England mill town, what happened to Charlotte was the beginning of the cover-up, the beginning of the end. Now a father is left shattered by his daughter's pain. A troubled mother is unable to cope. And a family is plunged into debt and disgrace as they try to bury secrets that refuse to die. The only rock that sustains them in their darkest hours is a woman whose own guilty secret has given her the power to ruin - or resurrect - the family to whom she owes her life."--BOOK JACKET.