Elmer Robinson returns from his final naval posting to build a life he never quite managed to plan. A journalist by training, a loner by temperament, he marries late, loves deeply, and loses more than he can easily bear. When his daughter dies and leaves behind a small Indian girl named Ettasa, Elmer, already aging, already alone, becomes the unlikely center of a child’s world. Across decades of New York winters, Parisian encounters, and Irish summers, he raises her with an awkward, consuming devotion. He also writes. Chapter by chapter, folder by folder, he assembles a novel he will never see completed. What becomes of that manuscript, and who finishes it on his behalf, is the novel’s most quietly devastating secret.