Everything they did was to protect the children… Ten years ago, they made a pact to push their children to succeed by any means necessary. Today, their teens are straight A students exhibiting excellence in student council, marching band, football, cheerleading, and robotics. They’re young, gifted, and black, and looking forward to senior year, their best year, before they all head off to college. And then one of them is murdered. The parents soon find themselves making a new pact: to keep the police and the community in the dark about what really happened that night. Someone is arrested, but is he really guilty, or just a convenient scapegoat? All they have to do is keep him in jail and get their kids through the school year, but someone starts talking, the kids start unraveling, and the parents start keeping secrets of their own. Just how far are they willing to go to protect their children? To what lengths will they go to cover their own lies? And will the police find the murderer? When the truth is finally revealed, it threatens to ruin tear a community apart. *A significant portion of this novel was previously published under the title The Covenants .