Rome, 7 August 2012. The day after his youngest daughter's birthday party, Vito Semeraro disappears into thin air. Vito has been separated from his wife Carla for some time. But little Mara wakes up on her third birthday asking for her father. Carla, to make her happy, invites him to dinner. Deep down, she too longs to see Vito again. They have been together all their lives, since she was a child, they have been each other's great love, the only one, they will be forever. But Vito was also a jealous, violent husband, capable of beating her for a smile at the tobacconist, for a dress that was too short. ‘Can a love like that ever really end? Even so terrible, even so sad.’ Two years after the divorce, the family is united again for one evening: Vito, Carla, Mara and their two oldest children, Nicola and Rosa. The presents, the cake, the sparkling wine: the party goes surprisingly smoothly. But, in the hours that follow, Vito is lost. Carla and the boys desperately search for him; and they are not the only ones, because Vito has had another woman and another almost-daughter for years, a clandestine family that he has always relegated to the background. But he also has colleagues who esteem him and, above all, a powerful sister and father, down in Massafra, Apulia, whose friends mobilise to discover the truth in their own way. It will be the police, however, who will find it, a truth. And justice will be entrusted with the task of ascertaining it. But can there really be only one, clear, unambiguous truth in these cases? Antonella Lattanzi, a unique voice on the contemporary literary scene, constructs a miraculous narrative mechanism - a detective story, a noir, a love story - populated by splendidly ambiguous creatures. Through a prodigious linguistic machine and a relentless, cinematic rhythm, he treads the ridge between good and evil, guilt and justice, love and violence in a tightrope walk. And it reveals, one by one, the secrets that revolve around its characters, until it sheds light on what really happened the night Vito disappeared.