Pauline and Brian are vacationing with their two small daughters and Brian’s parents on the east coast of Vancouver Island. Pauline slides out of bed, dodging Brian’s sleepy hug and taking her squirming baby daughter, Mara, outside for some alone time. She practices her lines for an amateur production of Anouilh’s “Eurydice.” She has been cast as Eurydice by the director Jeffrey Toom, a night clerk living with his widowed mother in a downtown hotel. Jeffrey casts her because he doesn’t want someone who looks “ethereal.” He is surprised by how much she knows about the play and the theater in general. Shortly after joining the cast, Jeffery and Pauline begin to have an affair, meeting after rehearsals once the rest of the cast and crew have left. When Pauline tells Jeffrey she has to leave for a vacation with her husband, Jeffrey is upset—he doesn’t think he can go the two weeks without her. She goes on the trip. Her father- and mother-in-law don’t understand the play. The father asks if it is, “One of those ones where they take their clothes of on stage?” Brian is an energetic, loud, and facetious math teacher. Pauline’s friends often complain that he is always performing. On the trip, Pauline is distant from Brian, although they stay up late into the night discussing the play. Brian says, "Logically, I can see killing yourself so you won't turn into your parents," Brian says. "I just don't believe anybody would do it." They end the night in a “comradely cuddle” and go to sleep. One morning Jeffrey calls from a motel on Vancouver Island. He could not stay away from her. He says he has decided that they must be together. Pauline tells Brian that she has to go and takes the car. When she gets to Jeffrey, he tells her they will go to Washington State where he will be teaching college drama. She calls Brian and tells him where she has gone. It is not until the next day that she realizes that she has left the children behind. She calls Brian to ask for him to bring them to her, but he says, “The children stay.” Thirty years later the children don’t hate her. They don’t forgive her, either.