He makes a choice. She makes a vow.

 In the fall of 1941, debates about duty to conscience and obligation to country simmer in the taverns of working class Philadelphia and on the pages of Dorothy Day’s TheDaily Worker. With a troubled heart Catholic pacifist and aspiring artist Edward F. Hohlfeld grudgingly complies with the draft. Weeks, later his principled stance on the bootcamp firing range turns Edward’s life into a nightmare when it lands him, bizarrely, in a barbaric mental asylum called Byberry with no ticket out. 

Confined to an overrun ward where terrorized patients are corralled and beaten by abusive hospital attendants, Edward rails against injustice. But self-doubt also tortures  him: did he rebel out of conscience or egotism? Edward nears despair until he meets his alter ego in hospital attendant and Quaker conscientious objector Walter Sinclair.

Together, they conspire to sneak out damning visual evidence of malfeasance to blow the lid off the corrupt mental asylum. To do his part, Edward must rely on his devoted sister Mary to deliver his sketches of hospital atrocities to the parish priest, while keeping her innocent and in the dark. 

Edward’s baffling fall from grace alienates him from his family and sets his devoted sister Mary on a decades-long mission to figure out how her beloved brother’s promisinglife went so awry. While Edward struggles for justice with his mind and humanity intact, a world away, Mary follows truths to a dark truth about her brother’s fate,the wages of family secrecy, and a nation’s shame.

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