At 63 years old, PJ Halliday would be the luckiest man in Pondville, if it weren’t for the sudden death of his eldest daughter and the way his marriage fell apart after that. But when PJ reads the obituary of his old romantic rival, he realizes his high school sweetheart, Michelle Cobb, is finally single again. PJ decides he’s going to drive across the country to win Michelle back. But PJ becomes a sudden guardian of his estranged brother’s grandchildren. PJ thinks he can ask Sophie, his adult daughter who’s adrift in her 20s, to come along to babysit. And Pancakes joins, a former nursing home therapy cat with a knack of predicting death. This could be the second chance PJ has long hoped for --- a fresh shot at love and parenting --- but does he have the strength to do both those things again? It’s very possible his heart can’t take it.

Natural-born healer Emma Starling once had big plans for her life, but she’s lost her way. A medical school dropout, she’s come back to Everton, New Hampshire, to care for her father, who is dying from a mysterious brain disease. Clive Starling has been hallucinating small animals, as well as having visions of the ghost of a long-dead naturalist, Ernest Harold Baynes, once known for letting wild animals live in his house. This ghost has been giving Clive some ideas on how to spend his final days. Emma arrives home knowing she must face her dad’s illness, her mom’s judgment and her younger brother’s recent stint in rehab. But she’s unprepared to find that her former best friend from high school is missing, with no one bothering to look for her.