Edith, just out of school, has been sent from her quiet English life to rural Italy. It is the 1960s, and her mother has issued strict instructions: tend to her ballerina sister, Lydia, in the final weeks of her scandalous pregnancy; help at the birth; make a phone call that will summon the nuns who will spirit the child away to a new home. Decades later, happily divorced, recently moved, and full of new energy, Edith has fashioned a life of contentment and comfort in Ireland. Then her best friend, Méabh, receives a shocking phone call from an American man. He claims to be a brother she never knew existed: a child her mother gave up and never spoke of again. As Edith helps her friend reckon with this new idea of connection and how it might change her life, her thoughts turn back to Lydia and the fractured history of her own family.