Short calendar day drops 54 cases on Amy's docket, and the long day stretches into night when she's forced to make a life and death decision about the fate of an abused child; Maxine decides to return to work; Amy's confrontation with Lauren's obnoxious new teacher leaves her with yet another responsibility in an already jam-packed calendar.

A death threat, coupled with Maxine's disapproval, puts a crimp in Amy's blossoming relationship with Tracy; Vincent begins to feel like he's Chris's pet project; Maxine rekindles an old friendship; Amy officiates at Donna's wedding to a convict; Maxine helps a second generation foster teenager keep her infant son out of the system.

Amy threatens to remove a young boy from the custody of a father who asserts his right to beat his son regularly with a belt, leaving welts; Maxine becomes frustrated by her ever-increasing case load and a system that doesn't seem to care about the children it should be serving as she struggles to get placements for two orphaned and mentally ill siblings; Gillian and Peter begin the adoptive process; Vincent and Donna work out some roommate issues; Amy's assertiveness in dealing with a judge who disrupts her courtroom lands her a job offer; Donna turns to a reluctant Vincent for advice after her conjugal visit with Oscar goes badly; Lauren goes into a full-tilt brat meltdown when the dancing supply store runs out of her recital costume after Amy waits too long to order it; Amy stays up all night to make the costume after spurning Maxine's offer to help.

After going on the date from hell with a Yale professor, Amy has one last fling with Michael the day their divorce becomes final; Maxine returns a stowaway boy to his mother; when Donna and Vincent persuade a reluctant Evie to deliver her baby in the hospital instead of home, she insists that they, instead of Gillian and Peter, act as her birthing coaches; Amy assigns a unique condition of probation to a bright and feisty teenager; Maxine fears that she's contracted Alzheimer's after suffering cognitive lapses, and is relieved to discover that it's only a concussion sustained when she bumped her head on a piece of furniture; Evie's son is born, surprising the family with his interracial heritage.

Maxine goes overboard in mothering Vincent after he's released from the hospital and moves back into her house to recuperate; Amy sentences a teenager accused of bullying small children; Donna uncovers incriminating information about Ian; Lauren's soccer coach turns out to be an old friend of Amy's; after the police reach a dead end in a child molestation accusation, Maxine stumbles upon the ammunition needed to reopen the case; Lauren lays a guilt trip on Amy about her being a work-outside-the-home mother; Amy demands a written apology after the investigation about her relationship with Bruce is dropped for insufficient evidence; when Gillian and Amy disagree about babysitters, Peter disagrees with his wife's plans to quit her job; after presiding over the case of a teenager whose infant son died after she left him on the steps of a church, Amy goes ballistic when a father at one of the soccer games becomes verbally abusive; Amy gets Bruce transferred back to her court, and is shocke

When Donna's birthing center burns down the night before she goes into labor, the Grays offer the use of their house for her baby's water birth; the family becomes concerned at Maxine's curiously dispassionate response to the news of Socrates's death; Amy is upset when Vincent decides to spend Christmas alone with Carole rather than with the family; as she begins to suffer from burnout on the job, Maxine shifts some of her caseload onto her colleagues and finally takes Amy's advice to see a therapist; Amy gives four girls who filed a false molestation complaint against their teacher a taste of their own medicine when she has them taken into custody.

Jonathan Ashworth joins the Sanctuary House team and manages to ruffle everyone's feathers; Amy tries unsuccessfully to displace some doubts about her relationship with Rob onto Maxine, but is finally forced to confront reality; Bruce quarrels with Winnie over their mother's move; Maxine is displeased at the methods Jonathan uses to engineer the arrest and conviction of the Roseland pedophile; Amy hears the case of a boy with gender identity disorder whose parents are charged with educational neglect for keeping him out of school after he's harassed by his classmates.