Every family has a script. Will Everett's was written before he was born.
Three generations of Everett men have practiced law in New York — a firm built from nothing by an immigrant great-grandfather who arrived from Northern Ireland with little more than ambition, and carried forward by a grandfather and father who understood exactly what that inheritance cost to build. By the time Will comes of age, the path is not a choice so much as a foregone conclusion: Harvard Law, then the family firm, then a life that looks, in every particular, like his father's.
And on the surface, Will wants that life. At least, he's spent twenty-two years believing he does. But the trouble starts just when all these plans seem to be falling into place — the very day his acceptance letter from Harvard arrives.
Harvard Law’s Latin motto echoes in his mind, suddenly sounding less like a noble creed than the rattling of family chains. Lex et Iustitia. Law and justice. Not always the same thing, his grandfather used to say, though no one in the family seems to remember why he said it. A family dinner where every gesture is measured, precise, and correct. His father, Edmund, slicing his lamb with the same metronomic exactness he's used every night for as long as Will can remember. And finally, the trigger: a sister who wants one more year at Vassar, and a father who's already decided she's not worth the investment.
Will offers to defer his own acceptance to Harvard, so his sister Tessa can have the year she wants. It's an impulsive decision, barely formed before it leaves his mouth. But it becomes the crack that everything else pours through.
His father's response is not anger. It's worse: cold, careful reasoning, delivered like a closing argument. “You're a man now, William. You make your own decisions. But decisions have consequences.” Every line lands with the precision of a man who has spent his whole life mastering this kind of self-control.
But there's a single, brief moment where something else slips through. Will, searching for the right words, tells his father: “I’m not sure you remember what it feels like… to want something different.”
Edmund Everett never turns around, saying only, “I remember.”
Two words. Will barely registers them before the conversation moves on. But they're the first hint of something Will doesn't yet fully understand — the tragedy of a man who once wanted something different and chose, long ago, to give it up.
Will doesn't know what his father gave up, or why. He only knows that he doesn't want to become a man who has to be reminded of what wanting more feels like.
So when his best friend Nate proposes an alternative — to join him for a year with the Farm Security Administration, documenting the communities being displaced for a new national park in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains — Will takes it. Not out of nobility, exactly, though he'll tell himself that for a while. Mostly out of the simple, urgent need to discover who the authentic Will Everett is, before the life that was planned for him makes him forget.
He has no idea yet what — or who — is waiting for him in the mountains of Virginia…