This novel is about the long reach of the past, and at first glance it seems as if she is going to treat the issue in personal terms. At the beginning of the story Laura is a 10-year-old living with her parents and sister on a farm. Her mother is an artist, a potter trying to make space for her creative life against the demands of family. She makes her husband angry by vanishing into the studio and neglecting the housework, and she frightens Laura with her own anger. Then she vanishes. A police search brings up nothing. Laura, however, knows more about her mother's disappearance than she tells: she is doubly burdened by her mother's absence and the secret she now has to carry.