Venice 1925. Somebody shoots at two teenagers who jumped a fence to retrieve a ball from Villa Kalman's garden. A couple of months later, a young man is found severely beaten and unconscious in the shed of the same villa. Who fired the shot? Who was the young man? Why was he beaten unconscious? Were those events related? Rachele Modiano Mendes is pregnant with her second child. She needs to unravel Villa Kalman's secrets before she starts a leave of absence from work.
When a diary going back from World War I is discovered, Rachele realises that her family is connected to the person who wrote the diary. The brother of the young man who was beaten unconscious. Before she unravels the story, she discovers what her father and two of her brothers were doing during World War I. A story that they had not shared with her.