North Dakota, late summer, 1999. Landreaux Iron stalks a deer along the edge of the property bordering his own. He shoots with easy confidence - but when the buck springs away, Landreaux realizes he's hit something else, a blur he saw as he squeezed the trigger. When he staggers closer, he realizes he has killed his neighbor's five-year-old son, Dusty Ravich. The youngest child of his friend and neighbor, Peter Ravich, Dusty was best friends with...

"Harold and Lucille Hargrave's lives have been both joyful and sorrowful in the decades since their only son, Jacob, died tragically at his eighth birthday party. They've settled into life without him, their wounds tempered through the grace of time...Until one day Jacob appears on their doorstep -- flesh and blood, their sweet, precocious child, still eight years old. All over the world, people's loved ones are returning from the beyond. As chaos...