Nine months after her father, a literature professor, passed away, Catherine Leary still hasn't fulfilled his last wish: that she scatter his ashes in the Seaboro River in South Carolina. Seaboro was the scene of a childhood tragedy that forced her family to move, and Catherine doesn't ever want to see it again. But on the evening of her thirtieth birthday, Forrest Anderson, her father's young colleague, and her former boyfriend, pays a visit and challenges Catherine with three three probing questions that her father had intended to put in a letter to her before he died. It's these questions that will inspire Catherine to make a poignant trip into her past.