What is love? Adrienne thinks she knows. She ran away from home and her rich, autocratic father when she was 16 because he told her to stop seeing her boyfriend. Adrienne thought it was because Joe was the wrong age, wrong class and her father thought her too young to know her own mind. However, it was more complicated than that and four years later Joe was dead; murdered.
Adrienne finds out the hard way that love isn't a simple thing at all, there are so many different ways to love and not all are happy. Joe's ex-partner tells her some terrible truths about just who her husband actually was, and from there it just gets worse.
She must choose life, not just hers, but for her family too and the safety of a man she has just met and thinks she can learn to love; a man her father actually approves of. However, there is Peter, who is in the way of that perfect ending, and she knows exactly who and what Peter is, and how she must contain him, no matter the sacrifices she makes, not least to her sanity, but sacrifices she must make for everyone she loves. Love is complicated and shifts and moves, slips away and back again, until she is unsure if she will ever grasp hold of it.