In present-day Michigan, Bunica, a grandmother, prepares her birthday dinner. She receives a bouquet of hydrangeas from her granddaughter in California, and another from her grandson and his wife. At dinner, she tells the story of her first love, Mikhail, a boy whose eyes were as blue as hydrangeas. They were separated by the Holocaust. In New York City, an old woman with a bad knee teaches a young dancer a dance from other times so that it can be archived. The old woman was famous once upon a time for performing this dance, a dance testifying to the choreographer's grandmother's experience of the Vietnam War. Going against her doctor's advice, the old woman uses her bad knee to perform the dance one last time to her pupil. In Los Angeles, a researcher collects data for a multigenerational study that has tracked Holocaust survivors and their subsequent generations, with the aim of charting their epigenetic inheritance, the genetic consequences of past trauma. The researcher tweets about her belittling colleague, who insists on calling their adult female subjects "girls." In Palo Alto, Brynn leaves the lab, having just contributed her data to an epigenetic study. She sees her grandmother, Bunica's, picture of hydrangeas on Instagram and likes the picture.