Trapped in the hotel of her husband's various business meetings, a woman finds herself adrift between lives when she is approached by a stranger with vivid memories of an affair with her that she can't remember. She's always sitting there with her husband. He's always getting up to take a meeting. The other man always comes and sits, the stranger, who always insists on his account of their past affair, and every time he does, it's more convincing.

In upstate New York in the 1850s, Abigail begins a new year on the rural farm where she lives with her husband Dyer. As Abigail considers the year to come through her journal entries, we experience the marked contrast between her deliberate, stoic manner and her unraveling complex emotions. Spring arrives and Abigail meets Tallie, an emotionally frank and arrestingly beautiful newcomer renting a neighboring farm with her husband, Finney. The two strike up a tentative relationship, filling a void in their lives which neither knew existed.