The crying tree - Naseem Rakha

Irene Stanley thought her world had come to an end when her husband found their 15-year-old son, Shep, murdered in their Oregon home.

Daniel Robbin, who had spent his teenage years in and out of trouble, gave himself up to the police and was given the state's harshest sentence: death by lethal injection.

Now, nineteen years later, as the superintendent of the state penitentiary prepares to execute Robbin, Irene Stanley must reveal something she has been hiding from her family.

Her revelation stuns her family and cracks open the secrets that surrounded her son’s death—secrets that reveal how little she understood Shep, her husband, or herself.