It has been two years since the death of Merritt Heyward's husband Cal, when she receives unexpected news--Cal's family home in Beaufort, South Carolina, bequeathed by Cal's reclusive grandmother, now belongs to Merritt. Charting the course of an uncertain life--and feeling guilt from her husband's tragic death--Merritt travels from her home in Maine to Beaufort, where the secrets of Cals unspoken-of past reside among the pluff mud and jasmine of the ancestral Heyward home on the Bluff.