In 2008, a daughter talking to her mother on a long-distance call hears cracks, and the phone goes dead. Later her seventeen-year-old brother returns from school and finds their mother murdered. She had interrupted seventeen-year-old burglars who shot her multiple times. Now from the perspective of time and reflection, Lois Schaffer creates a memoir about her daughter's life and the consequences of her death and voices a mother's plea for control of illegal guns.