It is 1985 and Yale Tishman is the development director at the prestigious art gallery of Northwestern University. Yale had recently connected with an elderly lady who, in her youth, worked as a model for an artist in Paris. The woman has a collection of paintings from the 1920s, and wants to "gift" them to the gallery. This is Yale's own project and he is devoted to it but events in his personal life are making it extremely difficult for him to concentrate on his work.
Yale's friend Nico has recently passed away from AIDS and every day the epidemic seems to take more and more of a hold amongst the gay community in Chicago. Yale finds that it also seems to bring the community closer together; He becomes particularly close to Nico's younger sister, Fiona, who become carer for so many of their mutual friends battling AIDS. Fiona is so caught up in caring for her friends that she does not take the time to allow herself to really take in the magnitude of each loss; every time a friend dies she moves along to the next. The only constant, aside from the crushing loss is the companionship of her friend Richard a photographer who is documenting the epidemic as it ravages the community from the inside.
Fast forward thirty years, and Fiona, like the docent with the collection of paintings so important to her friend Yale three decades earlier, is in Paris. She is trying to find her daughter, whom she has heard has moved to the city with a cult she has become entangled with. Mother and daughter are estranged but Fiona has experienced too much loss already in her life and wants to reach her daughter before it is too late. Whilst she is in Paris she stays with Richard, the photographer from Chicago with whom she had shared the experiences of the epidemic in the eighties.
Richard's photographic work hangs throughout his apartment and takes Fiona back to that time with a jolt as she sees familiar faces in the photographs whose loss she never really had time to process. She realizes suddenly that she was profoundly affected by the AIDS crisis, but this was never really addressed, because not being a gay man, she slipped through the cracks in terms of help and counseling. Caring for the men in the photographs decimated her life; it sucked the life out of her and took her away from her own family, seriously damaging her relationship with her husband and with her daughter. She realizes that both she and Yale experienced the same struggle, trying to find light in a time of darkness, and clinging to friendship and love when everything seemed to be catastrophic around them.
