Ten-year old Amanda Greene is teased and tormented at school. Home isn't any better where her widower father is often away on business, leaving her in the care of her teenaged sister who's too popular and busy to care about her. To escape reality, she creates fantasy stories, but life becomes interesting for Amanda on the way home from school one day when she stumbles upon a golden pebble that can talk.

Rian Field is living her dream as a Marine Biologist, but when she is attacked by a shark, it triggers memories from the past and changes her understanding of her present world. After surviving the shark attack, Rian Field continues her work at the Institute, determined to live her routine life. But as she attempts to cope with her growing post-traumatic stress outbreaks, she is plagued both by memories of an earlier trauma and a sudden onslaught of mysterious and ominous events. She soon finds herself immersed in an inescapable danger as she suspects that her former assailant is still threatening her life--and may be someone close to her; more disconcerting, though, is the growing certainty that the trauma is somehow connected to the shark attack, compelling Rian to uncover the truth of her past and discover who is after her.

Trying to deal with small town life and feeling that she has no real purpose, Raylee Johnson finds a new source of confidence when her former high school crush returns to town. When she begins to feel better about the direction her life is going, Raylee is thrust into a maze of doubt, uncertainty, murder, and deceit where the only thing she does know for sure is that her life is engulfed in lies.