Synopsis - Take That Step

Erin Miller can’t quite get control of her life. She watches daily as it spins out of control and everything she wants seems to be just out of reach. Her husband, Bill, would rather drink beer and watch TV with his friends than do anything else. She can’t lose any weight without gaining it right back and since she sold her business, her life consists of nothing but boredom and frustration, until . . .

One day a limousine pulls up in front of her house. She watches as the chauffer gets out, walks up to her front door and rings the bell. She opens the door and the chauffer introduces himself as Preston and invites her over for dinner to the home of Horace Hubble, whom Erin knows is the richest man in town.

Erin can’t believe it, and tells Preston so. He assures her that Mr. Hubble would simply like to meet her and they have a casual dinner together, then pulls out a wad of hundred dollar bills and offers to pay her anything to get her to agree.

She refuses the money, but dinner sounds like fun, so she tries to convince Bill to go with her. He flatly refuses because some of the guys are coming over to watch football all night. Erin calls some friends, but they are too busy with their own lives to have dinner.

Erin goes downstairs to tell Preston that there is no way she can be driven by a stranger to a man’s house whom she’s never met, by herself. But when she opens the door, three carloads of Bill’s drunken friends squeal into her driveway, and when she envisions the night she is about to have, she surprises herself when she agrees to go.

Besides, there is something powerful and reassuring about Mr. Preston.

She is driven to Hubble’s mansion and escorted into a large room where she meets a tiny, old man lying in an immense bed surrounded by medical monitoring equipment and a team of physicians and nurses.

Curious, she asks Mr. Hubble why he has insisted on having dinner with her this evening. After being coy and hesitating, he tells her that he wants her to be the executor of his will.

Flabbergasted, she refuses, but he tells her that he can’t and won’t trust anyone else, that he has been following her career with great interest and she is the person he wants to handle all of his arrangements. Erin has grave reservations about doing such a thing, but after some careful cajoling by Mr. Hubble, she reluctantly agrees.

Greatly relieved, Mr. Hubble thanks her, sinks back into the bed, then dies while looking right into her eyes.

Mr. Preston gives her a briefcase and drives her home. She opens the briefcase, wondering what could be inside that could bring meaning to a rich, old man’s life, and finds four numbered envelopes. She opens the first one to find instructions for her to give large sums of money to individuals and institutions, and to tell all of his relatives that they will receive nothing.

It’s strange for her to write so many checks with so many zeros in them, but becomes terrified when she must face his relatives because they are so unruly, but also because one of her worst fears is public speaking. With Preston’s help, she manages to accomplish all that.

The second envelope asks her to self-publish the book in envelope three that he has written, and she hires a staff of twelve women friends to help her.

During this time she begins to read the novel that Mr. Hubble has written. It’s called, Take That Step, and it contains all the wisdom he has accumulated about the meaning of life and how someone can attain true happiness; how people can enjoy the moment and do no harm, and travel the inner miles, get to know themselves and find inner peace. It tells in great detail how someone can take that step from the person they are to the person the want to be.

As she reads the book, Erin begins putting into practice what she learns, and ever-so-slowly she puts her life into focus and takes control of it once again.

Once the book is published and in the stores, she opens envelope number four. It offers her the Chairwomanship of the Horace Hubble Foundation where she would be responsible for spending his 12.8 billion dollars.

Stunned and unsure of herself, she asks Preston about this. He assures her that Mr. Hubble could have given away all that money initially, and told his relatives that they were getting nothing, but he wanted her to get used to spending great sums of money and face her fear of public speaking. And that Mr. Hubble could have self-published his book but he wanted her to gather twelve people around her whom she trusts to be the Board of Directors for the foundation. And he wanted her and her value system to be in charge of his money.

One year later finds find Erin out jogging with her husband. After her success at changing her life when she read the book, he read it and it changed his life too. And suddenly, Erin realizes that she is perfectly content, and that it was Mr. Hubble’s book and her determination to make the necessary changes that made the difference in her life.