Aviana Lehrer thinks she has finally reached the pinnacle of her career as a hospital executive in Denver when her life shatters and she is sucked back into the oppressive family drama she escaped ten years earlier. In order to ensure that her mentally deteriorating father stays out of trouble, she gives up her dream of big-city hospital administration, moves back home to the town of Berndtbridge, Michigan, and takes an entry-level position as a home care nurse under the tutelage of a far-less-experienced mentor.

But against Aviana’s wishes, her medley of idiosyncratic patients—such as a towering drunk living in a crack house, a young man battling AIDS, a retired university professor living in a book-filled house with his ghostly elder sister, and an Orthodox Jewish matriarch who has suffered a debilitating stroke yet insists she will dance at her granddaughter’s approaching wedding—infiltrate her life and begin transforming her own sense of priorities. Her patients begin filling the void in her heart created by her dysfunctional family and the untimely death of her mother—the only person who she believed loved her.

She also discovers her deceased mother’s journal,r which reveals shocking information about her parents, siblings, and herself. Finally, faced with her own major health issue—a large tumor resting beside her spine, Aviana uncovers the answer to an unmentionable family secret. Trusting the unfolding wings of purpose and belonging in her life, she finds that she is rising up into a satisfying life that she never imagined.