Salo's car accident kills his girlfriend Mandy and best friend David while Salo escapes with minor injuries.

Johanna falls in love with Salo at a mutual friend's wedding and decides it is her mission to help him heal.

Johanna and Salo marry, though Salo does not love her and still carries grief over Mandy's death.

After years of fertility treatment, a doctor successfully implants three embryos and Salo hears their heartbeats at the ultrasound.

The Oppenheimer triplets — Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally — are born but show no affinity for one another.

Salo and Stella, the only other survivor of his college car accident, reconnect at the Outsider Art Fair in New York.

Johanna spots Stella with a young boy near their Brooklyn neighborhood and realizes Salo has a second family.

Johanna arranges for a surrogate to carry a frozen embryo, and a fourth child, Phoebe, is born.

The triplets leave for college in complete estrangement — Harrison to Roarke, Sally and Lewyn both to Cornell.

Sally, furious at Lewyn's deception, invites his girlfriend Rochelle to the family's Martha's Vineyard birthday celebration.

Harrison cruelly outs Sally as a lesbian in front of the entire family at the beach clambake.

Salo tells Johanna their marriage is over and announces he is leaving her for Stella.

Salo dies when his flight from Boston to New York is hijacked as part of the September 11 terrorist attack.

Phoebe visits Harrison and learns for the first time that Salo and Stella have a son named Ephraim.

Lewyn and Rochelle are married at the Martha's Vineyard cottage on the anniversary of Salo's death.

The Oppenheimer family's story begins with a car accident that kills Salo's girlfriend and best friend, setting the emotional template for everything that follows. Salo allows himself to drift into a marriage with Johanna, who loves him deeply despite his emotional unavailability, and their difficult fertility journey eventually produces triplets who want nothing to do with each other. A fateful reunion with Stella, the only other survivor of the car accident, draws Salo into a secret second life, while Johanna responds by arranging for a fourth child, Phoebe, to be born via surrogate. The family's fragile surface shatters completely at the triplets' birthday celebration on Martha's Vineyard, where cruelties are exchanged and Salo announces he is leaving Johanna — and then dies on September 11 before any reconciliation can occur. Years later, Phoebe emerges as the family's unlikely healer, methodically uncovering buried secrets and reconnecting estranged siblings, a half-brother, and lost loves until the family gathers once more at Martha's Vineyard to witness Lewyn and Rochelle's wedding.

The headline events that shaped the Oppenheimer family across three decades.

Salo encounters a Cy Twombly painting in a German museum and collapses with a visceral, overwhelming reaction.

Salo uses his trust fund at age 21 to buy the Twombly painting and props it against his apartment wall.

Salo acquires a warehouse in Red Hook to house his art collection, along with four adjacent houses.

Johanna secretly stops taking her birth control pills without telling Salo, beginning a two-year deception.

Harrison arrives at Roarke and discovers that his intellectual hero Eli Absalom Stone is a fellow student.

Lewyn tells his Mormon roommate Jonas he is Jewish, and Jonas accepts the news with complete ease.

Sally stumbles onto a Shaker furniture exhibit at the Cornell art museum and meets antiques picker Harriet Greene.

Lewyn organizes a Passover Seder for Jonas and his Mormon friends and meets Rochelle for the first time.

Harrison and Eli travel to the Hayek Institute in Virginia, where Harrison abandons his prepared speech to impassion the crowd.

Lewyn and Rochelle begin a romantic relationship during their shared summer at Cornell, and Lewyn falls deeply in love.

Sally accompanies Harriet Greene on her first picking expedition, spending a week cleaning out a derelict house.

After the clambake disaster, Lewyn travels to Utah and enrolls in an art history program at Brigham Young University.

Lewyn discovers that four foundational Mormon artists were commercial opportunists, triggering a breakdown and brief hospitalization.

Ephraim's article proving that Eli Absalom Stone is a white man who has been passing as Black goes viral.

Harrison, Lewyn, Phoebe, and Ephraim share lunch at the Harvard Club, where Harrison accepts Lewyn's offer of support.

While the headline events of the Oppenheimer family involve accidents and betrayals, the texture of each character's life is built from smaller but equally formative moments. Salo's accidental discovery of a Cy Twombly painting sparks a lifelong passion for art that he deliberately walls off from his family, acquiring a warehouse in Red Hook that becomes more of a home to him than his house in Brooklyn Heights. Each of the triplets, cut loose at college, stumbles toward belonging and purpose in ways their parents never anticipated — Harrison finds a dangerous intellectual community, Sally finds a calling in antique furniture, and Lewyn finds love and then, after losing it, finds faith before ultimately returning home to become the steward of his father's collection. The secondary arc of the family's recovery runs through Lewyn's disillusionment with Mormonism, his return to Brooklyn, and the moment an article by Ephraim exposes Eli Absalom Stone as a fraud. These events clear the ground for genuine reconnection, culminating in a Harvard Club lunch where Harrison, for the first time, accepts the help of a sibling.

The discoveries, passions, and relationships that shaped each Oppenheimer sibling.

Salo crosses into Germany and feels the weight of his Jewish identity for the first time at the border.

Johanna confesses to Salo that she stopped taking birth control pills two years earlier, and they see a fertility doctor together.

Salo removes all artwork from the family home and tells Johanna to decorate it however she wishes.

Salo weeps about the car accident for the first time when Stella, the other survivor, tells him it was not his fault.

Salo brings Stella to his Red Hook warehouse, the only person outside his family he has ever shown it to.

Sally, age 13, follows Salo to an art opening and sees him standing beside Stella, clearly in love with her.

Sally meets Stella in the bathroom of the art opening without knowing Stella's connection to Salo.

Lewyn runs into Rochelle on the bus back to Cornell and lies to her, denying that Sally is his sister.

Sally visits Rochelle's home unannounced during spring break and discovers that Rochelle's mother is a hoarder.

Rochelle tells Lewyn she could sense her roommate was in love with her, transforming his understanding of Sally.

Sally sees Lewyn and Rochelle together at a campus Starbucks and realizes their relationship has been secret from her.

Lewyn tells Harrison that Sally is a lesbian while driving to collect Rochelle from the ferry.

Sally catches the morning ferry off Martha's Vineyard, the only family member to leave before Salo boards his flight.

Phoebe overhears Johanna tell her sister Debbie that Phoebe was born because they might as well.

Johanna reveals she found the Rizzoli collection in the warehouse after Salo's death and secretly moved it to Queens storage.

Beneath the plot of the Oppenheimer family lies a deeper current of secrets kept, discoveries made, and moments when characters are forced to confront what they have been hiding from themselves and each other. The family's culture of secrecy is established early, from Salo's suppressed guilt over the car accident to Johanna's quiet manipulation of their path toward parenthood, and it filters down through the generations as each triplet weaponizes private knowledge against the others. Sally's discovery of her father's affair, and her decision to hoard that knowledge rather than expose it, exemplifies how the family uses secrets as both armor and ammunition. The night of the Martha's Vineyard clambake burns every secret into the open at once, leaving the family shattered, and only Phoebe's patient, courageous excavation of the truth years later begins to undo the damage. The final revelation — Johanna confessing that she secretly relocated the Rizzoli collection after Salo's death — closes the last open wound, allowing the family to gather at Martha's Vineyard not in crisis but in genuine celebration.

The secrets, discoveries, and emotional shifts that fractured and ultimately healed the family.