When Fredrick gets sick, his master decides he's outlived his usefulness and plans to kill him. Determined to live, the seventeen-year-old steals his master's horse and leaves behind his sister-the only family he has left. Soon he finds a home with Mathew, a farmer whose six-year-old had died in his arms only months before, followed shortly by his older, grief-stricken son running away. His wife Victoria, devastated from the past events and unable to focus on anything for long, withdraws into herself. Leaving their oldest daughter to take over cooking, cleaning, and raising the rest of the kids. So why would Mathew take in a runaway slave and put his already broken family at risk? Why would he run to comfort him in the middle of the night when he wakes up screaming? Can the God Matthew serve really free Fredrick from all the pain of his past, and his anger at those responsible?