It's 1935 and Desdemona Hart Spaulding's life is far from what she anticipated after years spent studying art in Boston and Paris. Instead of the bright future she imagined of working as a painter in New York, Dez finds herself locked in a marriage of convenience to a kind but passionless pharmacist in the small town of Cascade, Massachusetts; a commitment made entirely for the sake of her dying father and his beloved Shakespeare theater. As Cascade becomes the potential location for a new reservoir to serve the city of Boston, all of the things Dez has put aside her dreams to work for become threatened, including the Shakespeare theater she vowed to someday reopen. She and the rest of the impassioned townspeople are determined to save Cascade, but when Dez begins to fall in love with Jewish peddler Jacob Solomon, a New York-bound artist just as she aspired to be, she finds out what happens when our heart and morality are stretched in two different directions.