How can you know someone until you learn to talk about the past? Present: Letty and Alf are the only English speakers at an Italian class in Rome, where they discover the language that really connects them is dance. Alf is nineteen, a former ballroom champion who seems reassuringly confident and at ease with himself. Letty - twenty-two, and unusually reserved and studious - has been forced to give up her childhood dream of becoming a ballet dancer. They come from different worlds, but when they waltz around the Piazza Navona together, a passionate relationship begins. Past: can their decision to live in the moment keep their histories from encroaching? Why is Alf living in a shared apartment, estranged from his family, and what has wrenched Letty away from the apparent security of her university degree? Perhaps the secrets they have yet to share will tear them apart . . . Future: When the unthinkable happens, Letty returns to London and Alf to Blackpool. But will the events that first brought them together also allow them a future?