Somehow, Joe Angel, the most famous businessman in the country had found Charlie in the backwater where had been hiding all these years, and arrived unannounced to give him an envelope full of money and a simple message: come back to the Capital to learn what really happened to Constanza -- the woman he loved -- on that terrible night decades before.

At first, Charlie is furious that Joe should just re-appear, and with such an outrageous demand. But by the time Charlie returns to the city to meet Joe, the tycoon is dead. And so begin Charlie Croker's epic journey back into his own past. It is an odyssey which seems, at times, to lead right to the broken heart of the country itself. After a lifetime spent trying to forget, Charlie realizes that there can, finally, be a reckoning with his those he has loved and those he has betrayed, and the guilt that has been suffocating him.