On April 9, 1995, an elderly woman living on the Oregon Coast reflects on aging, grief, and the way war clarifies who a person really is. With her husband recently dead and her own diagnosis worsening, she finds her failing eyesight and approaching end pushing her to look backward rather than forward.

Her house, The Peaks, is being put up for sale because her adult son believes she should move. Accepting his controlling concern, she begins boxing up decades of life but knows there is one item she refuses to leave behind.

She climbs into the attic and, amid stored holiday boxes and old furniture from her children and grandchildren, drags out an ancient steamer trunk covered in travel stickers. Opening it for the first time in thirty years, she removes a tray of baby keepsakes and finds beneath it a disorderly collection of wartime journals, tied postcards, poetry books, and hundreds of black-and-white photographs.

On top lies a faded wartime identity card. Her hands shake as she reads the name and sees the photo: Juliette Gervaise. Her instinct is to hide the card again, but she is crying and feels newly compelled to face what she has spent her life burying.

Her son, Julien, arrives and warns her about the unsteady attic steps, revealing his own strain through the smell of cigarette smoke he has returned to after her diagnosis. She insists the trunk must come with her and frames it as her last request; when Julien asks, “Who is Juliette Gervaise?”, the question jolts her into memory as she begins to cast back to the war.