Lindy Caton, middle-aged, attractive and recently divorced, accepts a position as Director of the Moulton Foundation in small-town Louisiana to be closer to her aging father. While building her new life, she encounters and assumes care of three elderly, eccentric women living in subsistence.

As her relationship with them grows, she discovers the extraordinary secret of their past that sweeps her into the dramatic return of an itinerant son seeking to reconcile with his mother over an ancient act of cruelty.