Nine-year-old Noel Enfield first hears this piece of her loving-but-stoic grandmother’s life advice when she arrives on the woman’s doorstep accompanied by a social worker and the terrible news that Noel’s mother had been killed in a car accident. Amid the bewilderment and grief, Gran suggests that Noel must learn to put tragedies behind her and relegate them to the past; that way forward builds resilience. Noel takes the lesson to heart.

At age eighteen, while studying art history at a London university, Noel falls passionately in love with aspiring artist and art school student, Bryn Jones. Shortly after Bryn leaves for a five-month painting trip through Italy, Noel discovers she is pregnant. She is ecstatic and believes Bryn will be too–they have plans to marry, after all. But mishaps and misunderstandings part the two lovers, and, desperate, Noel channels her grandmother’s counsel once again, this time choosing to move forward in a way that will change not only her life but the lives of everyone she loves.

Three decades later, when she is offered a six-month secondment to a London museum, Noel decides it’s time to prove she really has moved on from that difficult period by returning to the city where she met and lost Bryn. But rather than proving she has persevered, the move lands Noel in the thick of London’s insular art world, and only one or two degrees of separation from her past and the people she once loved.

After she reconnects with an old, dear friend and learns finally what kept Bryn from returning to her all those years ago, the revelation rocks the very underpinnings of her life. Some decisions made in the past could never be put behind her, she realizes, and armed with this new understanding, she sets out on a journey to reclaim what–and who–she left behind.