Lorraine and Will, New Yorkers married for 15 years, are having their first baby, via IVF. They are 40, successful in their careers—finance and music—with pasts that have held each of them back from one another until the day While We Were Waiting unfolds: the day in the middle of Lorraine's sixth month when she is rushed to the high-risk obstetrics unit of Met U Hospital. Over the next hours Lorraine and Will, individually, are compelled to face themselves and their pasts in ways they'd never thought possible.

Into the waiting room where Will struggles with his present and past enters Clement, a battlefield radiologist newly arrived in America—fleeing ISIS in Iraq, the husband of another patient making his own sense of the extremes that prevail with high-risk births. The agony of this waiting husband stems as much from his own shameful secret as from fear for his wife and unborn child. As the space shared by Will and Clement expands with every hour and revelation. Lorraine's labor compels her to let go of the terrible harm done to her as a child, making While We Were Waiting a story about the power of acceptance and the resilience of love.