For ten summers, the Seton family --- all three generations --- met at their country home in New England to spend a week together playing tennis, badminton, and golf, and savoring gin and tonics on the wraparound porch to celebrate the end of the season. In the eleventh summer, everything changed. A hunting rifle with a single cartridge left in the chamber wound up in exactly the wrong hands at exactly the wrong time, and led to a nightmarish accident that put to the test the values that unite the family --- and the convictions that just may pull it apart.

Charley is constantly forced to choose between his divorced parents. Until one fateful weekend when he leaves his mother to secretly be with his father, and she dies while he is gone. Charley is haunted for years, his own young family unravels, and one night he decides to take his life. But somewhere between this world and the next he encounters his mother and gets to spend one last day with her.