Short-listed for the 2002 Governor General's Award for Translation (French to English) Confident, hardworking, and practical, architect Anne Martin is living the good life in Montreal. Yet one day, high up in her apartment overlooking the city and the river, at the heart of her perfectly controlled universe, Anne witnesses a scene that causes a crack to appear in her life, a crack that slowly widens and eventually threatens her very existence. At this time of lost certainty, Anne's work takes her to Tunis. Here, among the ruins of Carthage, she meets Alessandro Moretti, an Italian archaeologist who is her senior by nearly twenty years and affects her as no one ever has. A struggle ensues, between love and jealousy, love and the fear of abandonment, love and other, even deeper fears. Anne gradually faces her demons the buried sorrow of a child of a broken family, the bewilderment caused by a mysterious family tragedy.