In 1972, they fell in love at first sight. He was a college football star -- good-looking, smart, fun -- a sweet Southern boy. She was sweet sixteen -- pretty, artless, chaste -- a good girl. A year later, Troy Stevenson and Patty Ayers were married. But in 1983, in moss-hung Verona, Georgia, the tender and tenacious love between this hardworking man and his adoring wife is tested by sudden adversity. Now a corporate executive, Troy must confront an old family secret that underlies his nascent alcohol abuse or he may lose his wife and the son and daughter he deeply loves. When his latent destructiveness is unleashed and impacts his family, he moves to their lakeside cottage to come to grips with his personal weaknesses. But busybodies at his company assume he moved to the cottage because his marriage is in trouble. Encouraged by the assumption, co-worker Brooke Emerson, an amoral, 1980s material girl romantically obsessed with Troy, attempts to seduce him, setting in motion a chain of events with harrowing consequences for him and his family.