In her early years, Allie and her bohemian mother Helena were always on the move. Now Helena keeps people at arm's length: relationships never last and old friends have slipped away. But when Allie inherits Helena's childhood home, she begins to see snatches of the tormented past her mother has been running from.

Determined to find out what keeps driving her mother away from people, Allie follows a lead to the beautiful island of Ischia. Here she is drawn into a community that still remembers the dramatic events of the summer of 1979, when a young boy was kidnapped and an English au pair took the blame. As clues to a decades-old mystery slowly rise to the surface, can Allie discover what really happened that summer in Ischia?