With twenty-two, middle school classmates gawking at the brainy, free-spirited, and offbeat attractive Kate McMillian, she initiates her tabula rasa, her new beginning. She marks her presence that she is now the school’s BGOC, ‘Best Girl on Campus.” Hoping to shed painful memories of her mother’s breast cancer death, Kate and her father, Papa McMillian, striking Hemingway in appearance and a brilliant university professor, relocate from Malibu to pristine Lake Arrowhead. From first sight, classmate Jayson Waters, unpretentious, merit badge touting Boy Scout, is dumbstruck by her outrageous appearance, striking beauty, and her ‘don’t mess with me’ brashness. In a short time, he asks her to be his first girlfriend; she agrees, but only in a platonic relationship, no hand-holding, and certainly no kissing. Maturing, they grow close, but their life’s path takes them in profoundly differing directions. She becomes a leading Los Angeles physician seeking to build a free clinic; he is a general contractor building expensive mountain cabins. Jayson is profoundly in love with Kate; she will not commit to telling him she loves him. After a failed marriage to a television celebrity physician and a fling with a fellow physician while on a Peruvian humanitarian mission, she sees the local Peruvian inhabitants’ genuine happiness with living a hardworking, but simple life. Kate realizes her pure joy is with a simple mountain man’s unwavering love. Kate returns to Lake Arrowhead, marries Jayson, becomes pregnant and feels she has closed her tabula rasa’s last page.
But an unforeseeable event causes Kate to begin a new page.