After Emily Harris' recent divorce, she returns to her hometown, where she renews her relationship with her exotic grandmother Eleanor, against the wishes of her mother Elaine, with whom she has her own fraught relationship. Eleanor, arch and secretive, has a passion she wishes to imbue in Emily — but Eleanor dies before the mystery is revealed in full. She leaves Emily an important clue: a small hand-loomed tapestry, possibly made by an ancestor. In an act of abandon that shocks even herself, Emily seduces her childhood neighbor and nemesis, Carwyn. Fleeing to the Welsh Marches to sort out her motivations, she discovers a branch of the family kept secret by her grandmother. With the aid of her newfound relatives, she searches for the keys to solving the mystery of the tapestry.