David Carter has always been a collector. Born at the end of World War II to a loving family, he grew up salvaging treasures from bomb sites in Coventry, building miniature museums to preserve histories and tell stories about his past. David eventually lands his dream job as a curator at the Coventry Museum, and he even meets his dream girl: Eleanor, an aspiring geologist from Aberdeen, Scotland. As they fall in love, David and Eleanor’s future seems limitless.

But David’s tidy world quickly falls apart. His mother’s best friend, succumbing to senility, innocently mentions that David was adopted --- his real mother was a young Irish girl who disappeared right after his birth. David’s and Eleanor’s lives unravel in the wake of this revelation. Eleanor leaves Scotland for good, and the radical break from her family threatens her sanity. David is almost lured into an affair with a co-worker, and he barely escapes with his life. As David and Eleanor settle into compromised versions of their dream lives, they raise a daughter who will eventually leave them, just as they once left their own families. As David learns to live his life rather than to curate it, he slowly comes to terms with all that is unknowable in the past, and all that is insecure in the future.