Grace Rein­hart Sachs is liv­ing the only life she ever want­ed for her­self. Devot­ed to her hus­band, a pedi­atric oncol­o­gist at a major can­cer hos­pi­tal, their young son Hen­ry, and the patients she sees in her ther­a­py prac­tice, her days are full of famil­iar things: she lives in the very New York apart­ment in which she was raised, and sends Hen­ry to the school she her­self once attend­ed. Dis­mayed by the ways in which women delude them­selves, Grace is also the author of a book You Should Have Known, in which she cau­tions women to real­ly hear what men are try­ing to tell them. But weeks before the book is pub­lished a chasm opens in her own life: a vio­lent death, a miss­ing hus­band, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only an ongo­ing chain of ter­ri­ble rev­e­la­tions. Left behind in the wake of a spread­ing and very pub­lic dis­as­ter, and hor­ri­fied by the ways in which she has failed to heed her own advice, Grace must dis­man­tle one life and cre­ate anoth­er for her child and herself.