The story begins with Macy discussing her parents. Her father, Duncan, was Danish, and her mother was Brazilian. They were deeply in love. She says, “It was almost as if they’d created their own language” (9), and she learned from them that love couldn’t “be anything other than all-consuming” (9). After cancer kills her mother, Macy doesn’t want love anymore.

Her mother left a list of points about how to raise Macy. Rule #25 was that when Macy got too tired to talk, the father should take the daughter away from stress for getaways. So, Macy’s father bought a weekend home not far from San Francisco. The most important room is the library. Her world becomes focused on the library and her neighbor, Elliot Lewis Petropoulos.