Nine-year-old Nell Kilvert travels with her father, Jack, to Hubbard's Point, Connecticut, determined to find her late mother's old friends Stevie and Maddie and succeeds in drawing out Stevie Moore, now a successful artist, whose failed attempts at love have driven her to live like a hermit.

Maura Shaw returns to Rhode Island with her teenage son and daughter in the wake of a tragic accident at sea in which her husband and older daughter Carrie vanished, and the three of them try to deal with the past, survive the present, and imagine a future at Newport Academy, the private school where Maura has enrolled Travis and Beck, and taken a job teaching English.