If you ever say anything to anyone, they all die. When eight-year-old greer donner falls off his horse in the washington wilderness, he braces himself to face the long hike home alone.But screams pierce the darkness, and he stumbles upon a dead-end road where a man is beating a woman nearly to death.In a moment of courage, he stops the assault, but he's left to face the man, who turns his wrath into an ominous threat: if the boy ever reveals what he has seen, his family will pay the ultimate price.The secret greer now carries begins his emotional unraveling. In seattle, gillian trett is a photographer with a troubled marriage and a childhood she's trying to forget.Domestic tension mounts when her husband's stepsister arrives.Desperate for a distraction, and a way to advance her career, gillian throws herself into uncovering the history behind an old man's holocaust photo of boys in a forest.The mysterious children and the truth behind the scene haunt her she can't let go of the image, or of her own shadowed past. Then a horrifying revelation entangles gillian's path with young greer's.The boy and the woman, separated by a generation and a hundred miles, each confront the terrible power of harbored secrets not only to eclipse the truth but also to illuminate the dark, unknown dimensions of their loved ones and themselves.