Alicia Train, at twenty-five, has so far failed in her search for a purposeful life. Unlike her elder brother Noel, a brilliant and committed pediatric oncologist, she has felt - and feels - no particular passion for very long, a shortcoming that increasingly bothers her. Orphaned by unspeakable violence as children then separated for years, the siblings were eventually adopted and lovingly reared by one of Texas’s most established families. Now, as adults, both have settled in the East. If Alicia’s head and heart are torn between a talented surgeon colleague of Noel’s, whose faith is first love, and a boyfriend from whom she has recently been on the rebound, a dashing, dissolute dreamer and would-be movie star, her fate is bound up with those of dangerous characters far from the margin of her world. When a pair of young, deluded thugs in search of easy prey stumble into her milieu, every life is changed irrevocably.