Ten years gone, Cora Pooler returns, a second time, to the Amish community where she was raised. She continues to be under the ban, shunned for abandoning a child thirty years before. Arriving in Wander Lane, she discovers her sister, Lily, has been buried in unsanctiffed ground; her sister, Violet, has married Cora's former lover, Aaron; and unbeknownst to her Amish family, the abandoned child is living within the Amish community.
With Sheriff Parker's help, and though thwarted by the Amish community's reluctance to accept Cora's presence in their fellowship, Cora attempts to discover the reason for Lily's unseemly burial place, and the reason the abandoned baby, her placement whereabouts supposedly unknown, is now an adult woman living in Wander Lane.