The son of a gravedigger, Johnny has a knack for finding trouble. At home, there’s no refuge. His father, haunted by the ghosts of the Korean War, drowns his pain in cheap whiskey, his words often cutting deeper than any fist. Johnny keeps to himself, not out of choice but out of survival.

People can’t hurt you if you never let them get close. Alone is safer. Alone is all he’s ever known.

The daughter of the most powerful family in Sunnyvale. Ambitious and driven, Mary dreams of becoming a journalist, but her path is destined to be that of her mother, the trophy wife who is just a piece of jewelry on her husband’s arm.

Ambitious and driven, she’s trapped in a dead-end town.

Norman was born an outsider. An only child, born out of wedlock, he grew up under the weight of a town that never let him forget it. Lost in the pages of sci-fi novels, he escapes to worlds where outcasts become heroes. But in reality,his mother works nights at the local bar, in a town that refuses to accept them.

More than anything, Norman longs to belong. But how do you earn a place in a world that decided you never had one to begin with?

After cops shot his father, Isaiah is uprooted, sent to the quiet, suffocating town of Sunnyvale to live with his aging grandparents. He carries a deep distrust, a quiet contempt for law enforcement, a lesson etched into his very being.

Street smart and book smart, he walks the tightrope of rural America, knowing that in a place like this, standing out can be just as dangerous.

As the daughter of Sunnyvale’s revered religious leader, Hester is expected to be the picture of virtue.But the townsfolk are unaware that her mother didn’t die, but left—choosing freedom and love over the suffocating expectations of small-town life. She ran off with another woman, a truth buried beneath whispered lies and polished Sunday sermons.

Hester sees through the facade, the forced smiles and quiet hypocrisies.