Margaret Greeve is an outwardly accomplished and finished person: a wit, an intellectual, and the wife of the headmaster of a well-established boarding school for boys. She dwells in elegantly appointed rooms and summers on Cape Cod, cruising the piney coves of the Northeast. Through a lifetime of deep reading and acute observing, she has encountered blinding instances of beauty and meaning, but nothing really prepared her for the grip of a mortal illness. By turns shrewd, desperate, and comical, her look at death and loss uncovers a depth of sexual feeling, a loving appreciation of lifelong soul mates, and a vision of her place in creation.