Dani Armstrong has been found guilty of breaking and entering with intent to cause bodily harm, assault causing bodily harm, and five counts of involuntary manslaughter. She knows that she will have to live without the privacy she craves for as few as four and as many as twenty more years. The parole board will decide how long it will be before she will be able to sleep behind a solid, windowless door that she has locked from the inside. Dani regrets the life she is living, but she does not regret what she did to the man who raped her best friend. When the friend, unable to come to grips with what happened, committed suicide, Dani vowed to make him suffer.

A few of the women in her writing class tried to persuade her to write about what she had done. It would sell, they insisted. People would love to read about the gory, real-life details. But Dani does not want to think about, much less write about her real life. She wants to think and write about the other lives she could be living. Fantasy lives where she could be a completely different person, and her every move would not be observed and documented. Lives where she could be a butterfly, free to soar, to coast, or to land and rest on a beautiful flower.

This book describes some of those lives.

The Honourable Mr. Campbell Greenshields, the judge who handed down Dani's very long jail sentence, often glared at her with his mouth twisted into an uneven smirk. She was on trial for breaking into a man's house while he was asleep, cutting off his penis, tossing it into his blender, along with half a bottle of his very expensive whisky, and blending it into lumpy, disgusting slime right in front of his eyes. Not surprisingly, sympathy for her victim had been evident in the voices of the witnesses and the expressions on the faces of the jury members throughout her trial.