The novel focuses on Emma Saylor Payne, and her summer with her mother's family, after her summer plans are canceled and her father scrambles to find a solution before he leaves the country. As her only option, she spends the summer with her maternal grandmother, whom she last saw years earlier at her mother's funeral. Over the summer she reconnects with relatives and friends she hadn't seen in years, and learns more about her past and connects the idea of her mother with the truth.