Decades of spiraling drug resistance have unleashed a global antibiotic crisis. Ordinary infections are untreatable, and a scratch from a pet can kill. A sacrifice is required to keep the majority safe: no one over seventy is allowed new antibiotics. The elderly are sent to hospitals nicknamed 'The Waiting Rooms' - hospitals where no one ever gets well. Twenty years after the crisis takes hold, Kate begins a search for her birth mother. As Kate unearths disturbing facts about her mother's past, she puts her family in danger and risks losing everything.