 In his 52nd year, former Union officer William Tecumseh Curry has finally achieved a separate peace. Twenty-two years after Lee s surrender, Curry s disillusionment over his role in this nation s bloodiest conflict has abated, supplanted by the rigors of a successful horse ranch, his legacy to a willful but loving daughter who is about to become a woman. His relative quietude is crushed when Justin Gatewood, a man from his past, resumes an obsessive vendetta.