Kate Weaver returns home to her family's farm in Apple Lake, Wisconsin, battered and bruised and carrying a secret. She is not yet baptized and has spent the past year at a music conservatory in Milwaukee, living among the English. Music is Kat's passion, and she is very good, so she faces a difficult choice: she must either give up her family and home to pursue her talents or come home and be baptized and give up on her dreams. And with Nathaniel King, the handsome neighbor boy she grew up with, paying attention to her,the choice of whether to return to school in the fall is even harder. Kate wins a starring role in an upcoming opera, and as she wrestles with pressure from her family and her newfound feelings for Nathaniel, she is also haunted by what happened to her just before she left school: she fought to protect her friend against an angry ex and landed the man in intensive care.
