After the near-fatal shooting of a former police academy classmate and an encounter with Sister Anselm, who is acting as a patient advocate for a woman who was savagely attacked by a drug cartel, Ali Reynolds is determined to seek justice in both cases.
The death of her mother brings writer Annie Barnes back to the New Hampshire mill town of her youth to investigate the pollution caused by the local paper mill, a contamination that may have been the cause of her mother's fatal illness.
The plans of four women--including a college student egg donor, a working-class surrogate mother, a wealthy woman, and her stepdaughter--are thrown into turmoil when the wealthy woman's husband suddenly dies and names the stepdaughter the unborn baby's guardian.