Plot summary

The Hansons--Jim and Linda and their adolescent daughters Bridgette and Megan--are a loving family. Immediately after Linda picks up a cryptic and incomplete telephone message from Jim, she receives a visit from a sheriff who informs her that Jim was killed in a car accident the previous day while on a business trip. Devastated, Linda calls her mother Joanne for support, and Joanne stays with Linda and the girls for the night. When Linda awakens the next morning, she finds her mother gone with no evidence that she had been ever been there. Later that day she runs into the sheriff, who seems to have no recollection of ever meeting her, let alone delivering bad news to her recently. Most importantly, she discovers that Jim is still alive and well with no signs of having been in any kind of accident. But she also experiences things that day that are totally inexplicable to her. She turns to various sources of professional help. For the next few days she awakens to find Jim dead on some and alive on others. Eventually she realizes that she's living the week out of order: she has no recollection of things that have happened earlier in the week that she has yet to experience, but she knows things that have happened later in the week that she has already lived. That knowledge of the future she finds is a powerful tool in being able to change the events earlier in the week, and which may change the course not only of the car accident but of what she truly comes to realize was their disintegrating marriage as the last day of the week which she will live being the fateful day Jim is supposed to die.—Huggo