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 The

Daily Worker. With a troubled heart Catholic pacifist and aspiring artist Edward Hohlfeld grudgingly complies with the draft. Weeks later, his principled stance on the

bootcamp firing range turns Edward’s life into a nightmare, landing him in a barbaric mental asylum.

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 conscientious objector Walter Sinclair. Together

they conspire to smuggle out damning evidence of malfeasance to blow the lid off the corrupt institution. To do his part, Edward must rely on his young sister Mary to

deliver his sketches of hospital atrocities to their parish priest, while keeping her innocent and in the dark. 

Edward’s baffling fall from grace alienates him from family and sets his devoted sister Mary on a mission to figure out how his promising life went so awry. While Edward

struggles for justice with his mind and humanity intact a world away, Mary follows clues to a dark truth about her brother’s fate, the wages of family secrecy and, ultimately,

the nation’s shame.