A careless moment. An overturned candle. An inferno that kills Nora Ferguson's parents and leaves her permanently scarred across her once beautiful face. In Dublin, Ireland. 1880.

Fleeing to America and finding work as a governess for a newly-rich family in Gilded Age New York until she is discovered as a writer. She will work as a reporter and then because the author of a novel about the horrendous conditions of the tenements and the suffering of the young prostitutes who can never escape.

And from a most unlikely source, a man able to ignore her disfigurement to discover love.