At sixteen Edie knows things. She knows that her mother is charming and beautiful, that her sister Stella is the golden girl, and that her father - clumsy, quiet Vic - is loving, gentle, sometimes detached. And she knows she loves Ricky, even if her parents don't approve.
But one Autumn evening when Vic fails to return home from work, Edie's world is turned upside-down, the certainties of her childhood destroyed in one terrible moment.
For twenty years Edie agonizes over the truth. What really happened to her father? What became of her lost teenage love? When she returns to her family home to sift through childhood belongings, Edie is faced with her unresolved past, and makes a passionate and dangerous attempt to return to it.