Vittoria Armieri—a humble worker at a ministry in Rome—has the ability to access people's lives: their pasts, their thoughts and feelings, and especially their tragic memories. Others would call it a superpower, but to her it's a curse: it's the source of such misery for her, that she's now desperate to die, possibly at the hands of a murderer. But while she recalls her youth and the events that brought her to this point, something unexpected occurs. Something that not even Vittoria, with all her eerie savviness, could possibly have foreseen.