Thir­ty years ago, Laura’s moth­er, Vio­la, went miss­ing. She left behind her purse, her keys and her mys­te­ri­ous paint­ings of a red house. Vio­la was nev­er found, and her fam­i­ly nev­er recov­ered. Lau­ra, an artist her­self, held on to the paint­ings. On the back of each work, her moth­er scrawled in Ital­ian, ​“I will not be here for­ev­er.” The fam­i­ly nev­er under­stood what Vio­la meant. 

Decades lat­er, at a cross­roads in her mar­riage and her life, Lau­ra returns to Italy, where her par­ents met after World War II. Lau­ra spent the ear­li­est years of her child­hood there before the fam­i­ly moved to New Jer­sey and set­tled into an Amer­i­can dream that even­tu­al­ly became a night­mare. Vio­la, who claimed to be an orphan, staunch­ly refused to speak of her life before mar­riage. 

In Italy, Lau­ra finds her­self on a strange scav­enger hunt to solve the puz­zle of her mother’s lost years. She is cer­tain that the paint­ings of the red house hold the answer to her mother’s past and her search takes her from her home­town of Brin­disi, deep into Puglia where she encoun­ters a man who knew her moth­er and who illu­mi­nates lit­tle-known secrets of Italy’s Sec­ond World War. 

Blend­ing ele­ments of true crime with set­tings that evoke Ele­na Fer­rante, Lau­ra fol­lows her mother’s tra­jec­to­ry as she ven­tures north to Naples, Turin and final­ly home. Along the way, she con­fronts the dark truth of her moth­er’s sto­ry and at last makes sense of her own.