Lenora Hope used a rope to hang her sister when she was seventeen.

The Hope family murders, which shook the Maine coast one horrific night in 1929, are now only a schoolyard chant. While most people assume seventeen-year-old Lenora was responsible, the police were never able to prove it. She has never discussed that night in public or left Hope’s End, the cliffside mansion where the atrocity took place, except from her denial following the murders.

She used a knife to stab her father.
took over her mother’s contented life.

In 1983, when Lenora’s former nurse left in the middle of the night, home health aide Kit McDeere shows up at a dilapidated Hope’s End to take care of her. After suffering a series of strokes that left her silent, Lenora, now in her seventies and confined to a wheelchair, can only speak to Kit by typing words on an antiquated typewriter. Lenora makes the alluring promise, “I want to tell you everything,” one evening.

“That wasn’t me,” Lenora remarked.
However, she is the sole person alive.

It becomes evident that there is more to the story than most people realize when Kit assists Lenora in writing about what happened before the Hope family massacre. However, Kit begins to worry that Lenora may not be revealing the whole truth and that the seemingly innocuous woman in her care may be far more dangerous than she initially believed when fresh information regarding her predecessor’s departure becomes available.