Five people linked by infidelity. What happens when one of the links breaks? Ella Stuart has a high-flying career as a neonatologist. She's been married to Jackson for eleven years and has been having a very civilized affair with father of three, William Ashfield, for nearly as long - she doesn't know whether she loves William, she just knows that she doesn't think the same way at thirty-six as she did at twenty-eight. Her life is brought sharply into focus when Jackson very suddenly dies, and she travels to his family's home in North Carolina to scatter his ashes where she encounters his brother, Cooper. Beth Ashfield has only her seventeen-year-old daughter, Cate, at home now and she feels her maternal redundancy keenly. She thinks she loves William, but she's been a long-sufferer of depression and the drugs she needs to take have caused her emotional life to run in a bland straight line. William is perfectly happy with the balance of his life but this starts to shift as Beth's neediness starts to weigh more heavily, and Ella, guilty at her betrayal of Jackson, starts to become a less accommodating mistress.