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Jordan Lawrie was doomed from her earliest childhood. Her father, a soldier, was killed in a training accident, and her mother wound up jailed when faced with the choice of leaving Jordan at their apartment while she worked at a diner, or being evicted and starving on the streets. This hurled Jordan into a life of abuse at the hands of an array of terrible foster parents, who mostly seemed to delight in beating the child with belts while working her half to death as a virtual slave. But the final set of foster parents treated her as a princess, seeing to her education and putting her feet on the right path to success. These days, she works as a paralegal at a firm specializing in business law. And she feels ready to confront the scars she’s carried inside all these years.

Phillip Lynch is a high school history teacher married to Ruth, a nurse practitioner. Ruth is Phillip’s submissive. They first encounter Jordan when she’s negotiating a scene with their friend Mickey, a scene that instantly goes sideways, hurling Jordan into a panic attack. Ruth tends to Jordan, talking her off the ledge, and proposes an idea to Phillip, to ease the pain of Jordan’s scars while hopefully healing his own scars from horrors his life forced him to endure as well, the post-rape suicide of his sister, and the murder of a kid he tried to save.

Can each of them reach inside and heal the other? Or does the harm already run too deep? Find out …