Deep in the heart of the rural South lies a small town as quiet and unassuming as any other. But it’s a place that accepts its secrets and believes that that’s the way things always have been—and always will be. Jess Hall, an adventurous, precocious boy, has grown up there and feels enormously protective of his older sibling, whom everyone calls ‘Stump’, an autistic child who has never uttered a word in his life. One day the boys climb up on the rickety rain barrel beside their house—a stunt their mother has told them time and time again not to do—and spy something through the window that they shouldn’t. Stump is taken away, the boys are separated, and catastrophe strikes, shattering the world as they know it. If Jess has suspected that there is much about the world of adults he doesn’t understand, he now knows that that knowledge is also much more dangerous and close to him than ever before.