It must seem odd to him how you got punished for the minor infractions. A "time out" for talking back. No Popsicle for coming home late. But for the major crimes, there was no punishment. How much "time out" for shooting your little sister? Giselle thought she finally had it all together. She'd escaped from the Midwest to temperate southern California with her young son, Teddy. She'd married Dan Trias, the impassioned professor of her Thursday evening composition class at Cal Tech. Dan seemed the perfect man for her: handsome literate, articulate. They had a baby - Trina - who bound the four of them together. They had become a family, inviolable. Or so she'd thought. When Trina and Teddy are involved in a terrible accident, fault lines immediately appear, revealing them as a family divided. Dan's ability to communicate collapses in the face of the crisis, and Giselle finds herself pulled between her grieving husband and her shocked son. And as she struggles to piece her family back together, Giselle has to teach herself the hardest lesson a mother can learn: how to forgive your child the unforgivable.