Five years after a horrific school shooting, the mother of the slain shooter agrees to be interviewed on a network news special called “A Killer in the Family.” As she tries to answer the questions on everyone’s lips—“Why did he do it?” and “How could you have not known what your own child was up to?”—the action moves between the television studio and non-linear flashbacks of the mother’s agonized inner and outer worlds, with glimpses of the father, the shooter’s best friend, and the shooter himself. The flashbacks probe the collateral damage left behind by a desperate and damaged boy: a marriage squeezed by the extraordinary vice grip of tragedy; two careers destroyed; and the anguish of going forward as the “parent of a monster.” At the climax, the mother, struggling to provide her community and the nation with answers, confronts two impossible questions: Can she continue to love her son? And should she?