In a doctor's office, a man and a woman sit stunned as the doctor speaks: Blood tests show without a shadow of a doubt that the son they love so dearly, and who is now dying, is not their child. Incredible as it seems, there must have been a mix-up in the hospital where he was born. Although they know their search will tear apart another family, they feel compelled to look for the child who has grown up in another home. At the same time that the Crawfield family's world is turning upside down, Laura Rice - Mrs. Homer "Bud" Rice - looking around her elegant home at her beloved piano and ancestral portraits, realizes that after nineteen years of marriage she and her husband are fundamentally strangers. Bud Rice is respectable and respected in their small southern town, a good father to their two sons - bright, healthy Tom and eleven-year-old Timmy, who despite his chronic illness is a gift of joy.