Gus Vorhees is an eminent doctor at the Muskegee Falls Women's Center, Ohio. One morning as he arrives at the clinic, he is ambushed by a hardline Christian, Luther Dunphy, and shot dead. This action leaves in its wake two fatherless families: the Vorhees, who are affluent, highly educated, secular and pro-choice, and the Dunphys, their opposite on all counts. When the daughters of the two families, Natalie Vorhees and Dawn Dunphy, glimpse each other at the trial of Luther Dunphy, their initial response is mutual hatred. But their lives are tangled together forever by what has happened, and throughout the years to come and the events that follow, including the eventual execution of Luther Dunphy after years on Death Row, neither can quite forget the other.