On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove --- to the subway bosses who have recently fired him and to his badgering, pregnant wife --- that “the hours of his life belonged to himself alone.” In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Saviour appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child. In Catholic Brooklyn in the early part of the 20th century, decorum, superstition and shame collude to erase the man’s brief existence, and yet his suicide, though never spoken of, reverberates through many lives --- testing the limits and the demands of love and sacrifice, of forgiveness and forgetfulness, even through multiple generations.