An affair that begins in an apothecary's garden brings Joyce to a hospice, where she tends to the dying alongside her own grief. A middle-aged woman recalls the lovable, lavable secret of the first night spent on her husband's farm. A mother and daughter discuss suicide while hiking a shipwreck survivor's trail. In Nadine McInnis's sophomore collection, boozers repent, gamblers reform, cheaters suffer, the deaf speak volumes, and cancer patients string flowers in their hair. Probing and compassionate, executed with a steady hand, Blood Secrets is an excavation of endings and their revelations: the affair that ends a marriage, the disease that ends a life, the effect of a long-ago suicide. And as her characters struggle to administer to each other in their final moments, each story becomes an autopsy, dissecting bodies for their secrets and daily life for the things it hides.