Norah’s grieving for her baby girl, Phoebe, who died in childbirth. In another city, another woman raises Norah’s little girl as her own.
It’s 1964 and a blizzard is blowing outside the small-town surgery where Dr David Henry finds himself delivering Norah's twins. Relieved, he sees that his son is born healthy, but recognizes the signs of Down’s Syndrome in his daughter’s face. In a split-second decision that will haunt their family for ever, he asks the nurse, Caroline, to take his daughter away.
As his wife mourns the missing piece in their apparently perfect lives, can David prevent his painful secret from pulling his family apart?
Kim Edwards is the author of the short-story collection The Secrets of the Fire King, which was an alternate for the 1998 PEN/Hemingway Award, and has won the Whiting Award and the Nelson Algren Award. Her first novel is The Memory Keeper's Daughter (Penguin, 2007). She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Kentucky.