Four years after the loss of her husband to the war in Iraq, and after the loss of her unborn child, Candice Newman allows the sun to dispel Tim's ghost. Yet at times, when she walks along the beach, the ocean still echoes of him, and of their pleasant memories gone sour. Unexplained occurrences have her wonder what sort of message Tim might need to convey. Candice desperately needs to ignore the many strange happenings where her dead husband is concerned. With her mother's help, she sets out to become whole again opting to get a degree in Graphics Design at the nearby Johns Hopkins University. First day on Campus Candice meets up with her cousin, Lisa Tyler whose visit six months prior was what gave her the push she needed to reboot her life. Lisa introduces her to a gang of eight students who hang together and make up an odd, but tight-knit clique. She also runs into Simon Bennett, a handsome professor, notorious as the Bluebeard of Homewood Campus. He is carrying on an investigation into the disappearance of a young medical student who vanished one cold February evening while running off to the lab in his shirt sleeves. The student in question happens to be his sister's fiance, so Simon will not rest until he finds out what happened to Jeremy. When one of the members of the ominous bunch of eight proposes she try a little experiment on Professor Bennett, since he has asked her out, Candice refuses. She finds them immature and so not the reason why she came to Johns Hopkins. When she turns down their little game of: yes sir, no sir, even when they promise they could rake in thousands of dollars on the outcome, she finds herself on Simon's side of the debate while she slowly becomes entangled in his own game of seek and find. Candice gets caught up in Simon's research of the case even police could not resolve. Authorities have too many suspects and as they have no body, no weapon, and Jeremy never turns up, they relay the file to Missing Persons. Candice soon realizes Simon Bennett is more tenacious than any deep and dark mystery, and that he will stop at nothing to get to the truth. The charismatic man has her mesmerized, and as Candice fears losing her heart to another dead possibility, she wonders if his quest might put her life in danger. Even more troubling, Candice doubts her hungry heart can survive another letdown. As she begins to do some poking of her own, she stirs the guilty party in motion and unwittingly sets the stage for murder..."