On a stifling August day, six-year-old Clare Fraser and seven-year-old Rudy Vantwest make eye contact from opposite sides of their street. For an instant they are connected, then each turns away -- Clare to the shelter of the garden sprinkler, Rudy to the excitement of his brother's impending birth. Twenty-five years later, Clare and Rudy, strangers living continents apart, fixtures of each other's memories and imaginations, are connected again. Overturning the guarded, insular lives they both lead, two events -- one an accident, the other an act of terror -- transform them both and bind the Vantest and Fraser families irrevocably.