Anna finds herself in a totally new life. After a brief respite where she is comforted by stability and family, she travels alone to Texas where an unforeseen event interrupts her pathology training. Tension mounts between Anna and Michael as she refuses to return home until the in-class part of her pathology certification is completed there. Once she does return, she and Michael take a long-awaited trip across land and sea to New Zealand. There, the relaxing vacation is anything but, and off to a tragic start and as Anna copes with the path of destruction surrounding her, she knows she must decide how to handle the mess culminating back home in Michigan. Michael always had different ideas about what Anna's career path should be. Anna is trying to process what happened in New Zealand, and a relentless captain in the police department in Austin, Texas is trying to piece together all the information there that tied what happened under his watch to Michigan, where a criminal was let out on probation..

In the meantime, Anna makes a shocking discovery and she now faces a future that she hadn't anticipated at all. All the while, her boss, Sam Choudhry, who is her husband's best friend, is trying in every way to walk again even though he has been paralyzed from the waist down from a gunshot last year and is wheelchair-bound. His depression becomes overwhelming.

Michael and Anna's adopted daughter, Mia has been begging to go away to a private high school in Northern Michigan and she wants to skip the 8th grade to do so. With undue pressure from Michael's parents to pursue this path, Michael and Anna feel trapped, as if everyone is making their decisions for them.

But the danger that lurks due to Michael's mother's kidnapping last year has the whole crew constantly looking over their shoulders. Would they be able to escape the insurmountable reaches of the Mafia, and its capo behind bars in a maximum security prison in Michigan? What did Anthony Lucita have up his sleeve this time?