Dee Moray arrives by boat at Porto Vergogna while hotel owner Pasquale Tursi labors to build a beach along the shore.

An aging Pasquale Tursi travels to Michael Deane's Hollywood studio hoping to locate the woman he knew decades earlier.

Rival hotelier Gualfredo arrives with his enforcer Pelle and intimidates Pasquale into paying a protection tax.

A local doctor examines Dee and suggests her symptoms point to pregnancy rather than the cancer she was told she has.

Michael Deane meets with Pasquale, Claire, and Shane at his studio, apologizing for past wrongs and promising to help find Dee.

Pasquale guides Dee to a wartime pillbox bunker where they discover five painted portraits on the concrete walls.

Pasquale leaves Porto Vergogna for Rome to find Dee's lover, stopping in Florence to visit Amedea and their son Bruno.

Pasquale arrives at the Grand Hotel in Rome searching for Michael Deane and is mistakenly cast as a film extra.

Pasquale confronts Michael Deane, who admits he invented Dee's cancer diagnosis and demands she travel to Switzerland for an abortion.

Richard Burton confesses to Pasquale that he is Dee's lover and the biological father of her unborn child.

Richard Burton and Pasquale enlist local fishermen and sail to Portovenere to rescue Dee from Gualfredo's hotel.

Richard Burton and Dee reunite in Portovenere, and Burton reveals she is pregnant rather than dying of cancer.

Aunt Valeria confesses she poisoned Pasquale's mother Antonia with a lye-laced loaf of bread at Antonia's own request.

The Deane Party travels to Sandpoint, Idaho, and watches Lydia's autobiographical play Front Man, in which Pat portrays himself onstage.

Pasquale reunites with Debra at her Sandpoint cabin after fifty years apart as the entire Deane Party watches.

The novel opens as American actress Dee Moray arrives at Pasquale Tursi's small Italian hotel, waiting for a lover who never comes. Pasquale travels to Rome and discovers that Hollywood publicist Michael Deane fabricated Dee's cancer diagnosis to coerce her into an abortion without her knowledge. Richard Burton reveals himself as Dee's lover and joins Pasquale on a desperate rescue mission to retrieve Dee from a rival hotelier's clutches. The reunion brings a devastating truth to light, but Dee's fate ultimately parts her from Pasquale forever. Decades later, an aging Pasquale journeys to Hollywood and then to rural Idaho, propelled by a longing he never fully released. The two finally reunite after fifty years, completing the emotional arc that began on the shore of a tiny Italian fishing village.

The headline events driving the novel's central story.

Boat pilot Orenzio reveals to Pasquale that Dee is an actress from Cleopatra, sent to Porto Vergogna by Michael Deane.

Claire Silver, tired of mediocre pitches, resolves to quit her job at Michael Deane's studio by the end of the day.

Dee and Pasquale share a cigarette on the hotel porch, and Dee opens up about her desire to live more authentically.

Michael Deane faints when Claire calls to tell him that a man named Pasquale Tursi is searching for Dee Moray.

Shane Wheeler declares he will not translate for Michael Deane unless Michael Deane agrees to hear his film pitch first.

Shane pitches his Donner! screenplay to Michael Deane and Claire, dramatizing William Eddy's harrowing Donner Party survival story.

Michael Deane agrees to produce Shane's Donner! screenplay and offers him ten thousand dollars for the rights.

Pat Bender accepts an Irish promoter's invitation to tour the United Kingdom in a bid to revive his music career.

Pat's Edinburgh festival performances grow from a near-empty crowd to larger audiences after he begins self-advertising.

Pat is left stranded and destitute in London after his promoter disappears and he forfeits his contract renewal.

Antonia gives Pasquale her blessing to marry Dee before Pasquale and Richard Burton set sail for Portovenere.

Dee announces to Pasquale that she and Richard Burton will travel to Switzerland to have the abortion.

Gualfredo and Pelle return to Porto Vergogna to pressure Pasquale, but fisherman Lugo ends the brawl by shooting Pelle in the foot.

The Deane Party meets a private investigator who reveals Debra runs a theater in Sandpoint, Idaho, with a play that very night.

Claire gives Michael Deane an ultimatum, and he agrees to leave Pat and Debra alone and co-produce a Front Man film adaptation.

While Dee's arrival in Porto Vergogna sets the novel in motion, a web of crucial secondary events surrounds the central romance. In Hollywood, Claire Silver weighs her career disillusionment while Shane Wheeler boldly bets his future on a single pitch, and Michael Deane's fainting spell signals the depth of his entanglement with the past. Pat Bender's ill-fated UK tour charts the rise, collapse, and quiet survival of a rock star who cannot release his grip on faded glory. Back in 1962, Pasquale's alliances shift as Dee's plans crystallize and Gualfredo's violence returns with unexpected reinforcements waiting to meet it. The private investigator's file and the Sandpoint theater bring the scattered threads of the story into one place. By the novel's end, characters who orbited the central romance reach their own resolutions, with Claire's ultimatum redirecting Michael Deane's worst impulses toward something more humane.

The significant moments that shape the characters surrounding the main story.

Pasquale becomes infatuated with Dee when she turns toward him and her face comes together as a single, perfect thing.

American writer Alvis Bender first appears at The Hotel Adequate View during Pasquale's boyhood and influences the hotel's unusual name.

Wartime soldier Alvis abandons his post in Italy to accompany a woman named Maria, giving his friend Richards a prized Luger.

Maria gives Alvis a sexual act out of fear of rape by soldiers, and Alvis weeps when he understands her motivation.

Pasquale produces a postcard from Dee revealing she kept the baby and named her son Pat after Pasquale himself.

Pat calls Lydia from London begging for a second chance, and Lydia tells the nearby Dee it is no one calling.

Debra watches a visibly deteriorating Richard Burton in a film at a movie theater and privately fantasizes about her abandoned career.

Michael Deane leaks Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor's affair to the paparazzi, using the scandal as free publicity for Cleopatra.

Michael Deane discovers Dee is pregnant and concocts a plan to disguise her pregnancy symptoms as cancer to arrange an abortion.

Theater director Ron accuses Debra of using people and playing with their lives as though they mean nothing to her.

Debra realizes she does not truly love Alvis as deeply as he loves her, then watches him die in a sudden car wreck.

Pasquale discovers Dee sheltering alone in the pillbox bunker after the Portovenere rescue and brings her back to the hotel.

Pasquale says goodbye to Dee and recognizes that his life has split into two permanent paths he cannot travel simultaneously.

Pat hurls a camera into the lake to stop a hired investigator from filming Debra's revelation about Pat's biological father.

Pasquale and Debra vacation in Italy, catching up on five decades of their lives as they hike toward the pillbox bunker.

The novel's deepest turns hinge on moments of recognition and revelation that permanently alter its characters. Pasquale's initial infatuation with Dee and Alvis Bender's haunted wartime decisions establish the emotional stakes early, setting up a world where desire and regret are inseparable. A postcard revealing Pat's existence and Pat's desperate phone call from London expose the painful gap between the lives characters imagined and the ones they are actually living. Michael Deane's cynical manipulation of the Burton-Taylor affair pulls back the curtain on Hollywood's darkest machinery, while Debra's private grief watching Richard Burton deteriorate on screen reveals the cost of the life she did not choose. Alvis's sudden death and Pasquale's agonizing farewell to Dee crystallize the novel's argument that every life is divided between the path taken and the one forever imagined. The novel closes with Pasquale and Debra finally walking the same path toward the bunker where their story first made sense to both of them.