Meridian Wallace, is obsessed with birds, determined to get a PhD and become an ornithologist. But she didn't expect to fall in love with her physics professor, Alden Whetstone. When he's recruited to Los Alamos, New Mexico in the 1940s, to take part in a mysterious wartime project, she reluctantly defers her own plans and joins him, but begins to fade into the background. Years later, when a Vietnam veteran introduces her to freedoms born of the era, Meridian begins to reclaim her identity and patch together a new and meaningful life.