In Terenure, a pleasant suburb of Dublin, in the winter of 2009, it has snowed. Gina Moynihan, a girl about town, recalls the trail of lust and happenstance that brought her to fall for "the love of her life," Sean Vallely. As the city outside comes to a halt, Gina remembers the days of their affair in one hotel room or another, long afternoons, made blank by bliss and denial. Now, as the streets and the stillness and the vertigo of the falling snow make the day luminous and full of possibility, Gina walks through the weather to meet a girl she calls Sean's "beautiful mistake"; his fragile, twelve-year-old daughter, Evie.