Aaron and Jimmy’s five-year relationship is disrupted when playwright Aaron is nominated for a Drama Desk Award. Though neither of them is entirely sure what a Drama Desk Award is, it’s important enough to get Aaron’s name in the New York Times and to have the phone ringing off the hook. Jimmy is in hog heaven: This is exactly the kind of step up to fame and fortune he’s been waiting for since he gave up acting and moved in with Aaron. Aaron, however, a moody, actor-hating stay-at-home, finds himself paralyzed with fear, waking up in the night with visions of horror, crying out the name of a 1940s Greer Garson movie called Random Harvest. He’s also driven to make contact with the subject of an article he’s fact-checking for a living: Donna, the mother of a high school senior who committed suicide shortly after winning a prestigious athletic trophy.

In the days following the announcement of Aaron’s nomination, Jimmy’s excitement, and his frustration with Aaron, builds, and they both find themselves drawn into Aaron’s visions, now focused almost exclusively on one of the supporting players in Random Harvest, Susan Peters, a young actress who received an Oscar nomination in 1942 for the movie and was then apparently never heard from again. Assisting Aaron’s investigation into what happened to Susan Peters and why she’s haunting him is none other than Greer Garson, who pops up in the kitchen one day as a kind of guardian angel.

On the night of the Drama Desk Awards, Aaron stays home and Greer informs him that he has in fact been assigned the task of helping Susan let go of her life on Earth and cross over into Heaven. Aaron has no idea how or why he’s supposed to do this, but before he has time to think about it, Jimmy returns from the award ceremony with surprising news -- and the announcement that he’s leaving Aaron. Stunned, Aaron is then confronted with Susan, who, when he attempts to carry out his assignment from Greer, finally reveals the truth of the terrible accident that ended her career and her life.

Armed with this information and the transcendent experience of Susan’s ascent to Heaven, Aaron is able to offer Donna his first real insight into why her son may have killed himself, and to finally confront his own terror of success and move forward with his work and his life, alone now but more self-aware, and touched by the power and mystery of fate and choice.