Eighty-five-year-old Helen Bryan thinks she might have found a new bird species on one of the many feeders in her yard. On the same day, her dead husband appears and tells her a riddle that brings back memories she would rather leave behind.

As she tries to solve the mystery of the new bird, she must also find answers to the riddle. The two quests become deeply intertwined as she seeks help from her former ornithology professor, a mentor turned tormenter. When the professor kills the one new bird Helen knows exists and takes it back to his laboratory for study, her anger sends her on a quest to find more birds of the same kind.

With severe arthritis, balance problems, and a recent painful shoulder injury, Helen is poorly equipped for searching the rugged mountains where she thinks a flock of the new birds might be. However, she secretly sets off to seek the evidence she needs. Along the way, her dead husband appears to her several more times, offering little help in solving his riddle but causing her to review and re-think the life she's lived.

All she endures on her trek into the mountains fails to achieve the results she longs for, and she nearly dies in the effort. Only the intervention of the young editor of the local newspaper, a woman Helen wants to trust but still holds at arm's length, saves her.

Helen winds up in a nursing facility, diagnosed with rapidly developing dementia. She learns from the newspaper editor that her nemesis has claimed credit for the new bird species. But the editor also has a secret, one Helen asks not be revealed until after her death. It's a secret that will, in small but significant ways, change history.