In the midst of a chaotic midnight assembly, Sunshine is forced outside into the darkness. Holding a scrap of paper scrawled with a stranger’s name and address, Sunny grasps the hands of her three small children and begins her escape.

Liesel Albright always dreamed of starting a family. She never bargained on getting one already in progress. Or one so deeply damaged. When police foil a planned mass suicide at a nearby cult compound, Liesel and her husband, Chris, are transfixed by the evening news. Led by a dangerously charismatic man called Joyful, the Family of Superior Bliss plotted their own deaths to thwart a long-foretold apocalypse. Among the survivors is Sunshine, the daughter stolen from Chris’s life years before. His tragic secret…now his legal charge.

Now, instead of raising a baby of her own, Liesel must play mother to Sunshine and Sunshine’s three small children while Chris retreats into guilt and denial. But a lifetime’s twisted teachings are not easily unlearned—Sunshine hears Joyful’s ominous catechism like a malignant drumbeat in her troubled mind: devastation without salvation. It’s a powerful mantra that’s drowning out Liesel’s loving overtures, and driving her new stepdaughter to finally save them all...in Joyful fashion.