Summary

Dr. Ben Givens is a 73-year-old retired heart surgeon whose wife, Rachel, died 19 months before the start of the novel. In Chapter 1, Ben lay awake in bed in his Seattle home the night before the day he planned to commit suicide. Ben wished to avoid the pain of dying from colon cancer by taking his own life.

Ben owned two dogs, Tristan and Rex. Ben planned to make his suicide look like a hunting accident by killing himself while on a hunting trip with the dogs, using a shotgun he’d inherited from his father. That morning, Ben carefully made sure that everything in his house looked normal and like he planned to return so that his daughter would not suspect that he had taken his own life. Ben had dinner with his daughter and his grandson Chris the previous night and had told...