It is 1910 and Corley Roper, a famous children's author, is mourning the death of his young daughter. Estranged from his wife and wracked by grief, he happens one night upon Mary Wilson, a woman in a similar situation, as she mourns the stillbirth of her son. No longer able to enter into the fictional world that made his name, and haunted by the ghost of this other lost child, Roper decides to solve the mystery of Mary's ancestry, a journey which will take stranger twists than he ever could have imagined.