When Ellen Gulden learns that her mother has cancer, her father insists that Ellen come home to look after Kate. Ellen has always been the special child, the high achiever, her father's intellectual match. All her successes have been geared to pleasing her academic father, yet as Ellen cares for Kate she learns many surprising things about her mother's life and the choices she has made. As Kate Gulden's pain increases so does Ellen's belief that her mother's suffering in unendurable. That doesn't mean she could possibly give the overdose of morphine that kills her, but, standing accused of a mercy-killing, she believes she knows who did.