Holden Garfield is a foreign correspondent, burnt out before he's thirty, who comes back to Virginia to try to forget his experiences of war abroad and to find new hope in his life. What he finds, instead, is a woman who is desperate for his help. Through a chance phone call, Holden learns that his mentor's sister, Melanie, is hospitalized in Richmond with hysterical amnesia after her husband and sons were killed in a freak act of nature. Holden sets out to help her reconstruct her past, and almost at once the two embark on a passionate love affair - one fighting to remember, the other yearning to forget.