The novel begins with an imagined setting, a place that narrator knows she “will never set eyes upon” (3). Christine, a “gentle, fragile soul,” is in the throes of a horrific childbirth. She is medicated to the point of “thrashing […] to help her defeat the pain” (4). Nurses hold down her legs as she births a “[s]ilent flesh […] blue and still” (3). Christine is too medicated to know what is taking place, but a man standing in the door, “stately, dignified […] to become a grandfather today” (4), converses with the medical team. He asks if his daughter might try and have another child and is told it would be too dangerous. He is almost resigned to his sorrow, to the loss of another generation, when the doctor approaches him, saying he has something to suggest.

Dutiful daughter Avery Stafford accompanies her father, Senator Wells Stafford, to a nursing home in Aiken, South Carolina. The two ride alone but quietly together in their limo, Senator Stafford’s omnipresent assistant, Lesley, having been sent to ride in a separate vehicle. Avery finds herself wishing she could fuss over her father. Observing his static shocked gray hair, she wants “to smooth if down for him” (7) but she doesn’t, realizing that he is a prideful man.