Twenty years have passed since Dr. Tom Gilder left the sleepy village of Ormston in search of a new life. But when his now-adult daughter, Lucy Gilder, returns to the family’s old cottage to escape a broken engagement and burnout from city life, she finds that the village hasn’t changed — and yet, nothing is quite the same.
The surgery, once bustling under Tom and Arthur Gilder’s care, now sits unused, slowly overtaken by ivy and time. The pub still serves lukewarm pints, the local mechanic still talks too loud, and gossip flows faster than the river down the hill. But a deep unease is quietly rippling through Ormston. After settling in, Lucy discovers her grandfather’s journals — filled not just with patient records and personal anecdotes, but with observations of something peculiar: a series of medical anomalies that once quietly plagued the village. Birth defects, rare blood types, uncanny recoveries. And curiously, they all seemed to center around a specific group of families — hers included.
When a young boy falls ill with a mysterious condition no city doctor can diagnose, Lucy is reluctantly pulled into a role she swore she’d left behind: village doctor. With only her instincts, dusty medical books, and her grandfather’s notes, she starts treating patients — and soon uncovers a possible connection between the strange illnesses and a decades-old pharmaceutical trial secretly run in the village during the 1960s. As she delves deeper, Lucy faces resistance from longtime residents who would rather let the past lie buried. Her only allies are Franklin, a reclusive historian with a bad leg and sharp tongue, and Amira, a traveling nurse from Manchester who believes in the healing power of community.
Together, they uncover evidence of tampered birth records, an abandoned laboratory in the woods, and a missing researcher whose notes suggest Ormston was once part of a radical experiment in genetic therapy. But the most shocking discovery lies closer to home: Lucy’s own father may have known more than he let on — and left clues for her to finish what he couldn’t. As Lucy reopens the surgery and rediscovers her calling, she must navigate the push and pull between tradition and truth, medicine and memory. In doing so, she begins to heal not just the village — but herself.
