For generations, Rich Gunderson's family has chopped a living out of the redwood forest on California's rugged coast. It's treacherous work, and though his son Chub hopes for nothing more than to scale the huge trees like his father, Rich longs to give him a safer future. Now timber giant Sanderson Co looks set make a killing on Damnation Grove, a swath of uncut redwoods on Rich's doorstep, that could be the answer to his prayers. But it's a gamble that's going to take everything he's got, and not one he's prepared to share with his wife, Colleen. Colleen, meanwhile, is guarding secrets of her own: the pain of her dwindling hopes that one day there will be a little brother or sister for Chub and the evidence she is gathering that she's not the only woman to have lost several pregnancies.