Athena and Dexter Fox are content. They love each other. They are friends. They live with their two young sons in a sparsely furnished house near the Merri Creek: its walls cracking, its floors sloping and its doors hanging loosely in their frames. There is a piano in their kitchen. But then, Dexter runs into Elizabeth, an old friend from his university days. She brings into his world her loose-living musician boyfriend, Philip, and her seventeen-year-old sister, Vicki. And all at once, the bonds that hold the Fox family together begin to fray