Content Warning: This section of the guide describes and discusses the source text’s depiction of death by suicide, sexual violence, domestic abuse, alcohol use disorder, mental illness, and genocide.

Narrator and protagonist Jack McCall describes his wife Shyla’s death by suicide. Shyla jumped to her death from the Pearlman Bridge in Charleston, South Carolina in 1979. When Shyla’s body was found, she had a fresh tattoo on her arm, replicating her father’s tattoo from his time as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. A year after Shyla’s death, Jack moved with their three-year-old daughter, Leah, to Rome.

Shortly after Shyla’s funeral, her parents sued Jack for custody of Leah. Jack won the court case due to a letter that Shyla had written before her death.

Jack, a travel and cookbook writer, makes a new life in Rome, away from the memories of his past. Jack admits to feeling torn between his love of Rome and his longing for his home in the American South. He tells Leah stories about his childhood. One of Leah’s favorite stories is about the night Jack fell in love with Shyla: They danced at a party in a beach house with a foundation destroyed by the tide; the house washed into the ocean while the two were dancing.