Costanza Ansaldo, a half-Italian and half-American translator, thinks she has made peace with her childlessness. A year after the death of her husband, she returns to Florence, where she spent many happy times in her youth. There she meets Andrew Weissman, an acutely sensitive seventeen-year-old, and his father, Henry, a charismatic physician who specializes in reproductive medicine. The triangle resumes three months later in New York, where the relationships among them turn and tighten with combustive effects that cut to the core of what it means to be a father, a son, and―for Costanza―a potential mother.