A child is born who fails to take his first breaths. Overcome with anguish, Ethan, the village physician and constable, who is also knowledgeable in the ways of magic, transfers his son's newborn soul into the body of his daughter's beloved cat, Ghost. There, the child is safely kept until Ethan is able to find a suitable body for his son to inhabit. The harrowing predicament soon becomes a moral dilemma, for both Ethan and his wife Abigail, who only have until the aging cat departs this world. All the while, the family is plagued by gossip and suspicion at the hands of their superstitious neighbors. Will Ethan cave beneath the weight of his confliction and allow his son to pass into the afterlife, as nature intended? Or will an unexpected opportunity allow him to give the child the long and happy life that fate cruelly denied him?