Painter Elaine Risley, pushing fifty, returns from Vancouver to Toronto for a retrospective of her work. Toronto is the city she fled many years earlier, hoping to leave behind the tyrannical and obsessive memories of her early life there. Now, as she wanders the streets of Toronto she confronts the submerged layers of her past- her unconventional family, her eccentric and brilliant brother, the self-righteous Mrs. Smeath, and two men Elaine later came to love. But it is is the enigmatic Cordelia, once her tormentor, then her best friend, whose elusive yet powerful presence in her life Elaine finally comes to understand.
