When Rachel, a successful art critic, attends an exhibition by an up-and-coming artist, she is unsettled by the eerie familiarity of his paintings. They bring to mind a tragic event from the past and a cowardly decision she made. As her relationship with the artist develops, she searches for a way to come to terms with this and is drawn back to a man she loved and worked with many years ago in Cairo. This man had warned her that, one day, fate may find a way to punish her.

As the story unfolds in three different countries over fifteen years, the tension and conflict between Rachel's relationship with two different men and two different worlds accelerates. Eventually, she must pay a steep price to fully atone for what she did.