Now in her seventies, Olivia reads an obituary that takes her back 50 years to the time when she left small-town life in Minnesota to what she saw as an exciting, cosmopolitan adventure in Washington, D.C. The name in the death notice is one she has tried to pack away in memory, but she is to learn that nothing stays silent, as hard as one tries to tamp it down. As she journeys through recollection, she considers her own silence and how it authored the unexpected turns of her life.