This beautiful, exotic novella follows Catarina (Cat) as she, in turn, follows the wish of her father, dying in San Francisco, to sell his old Lisbon apartment. When Cat arrives in Portugal, she discovers that her friend T nio has installed his ex-lover, Mateus, in the apartment, where he too is dying - of AIDS. As Cat struggles to untangle a complicated web of present desires and past secrets, she makes a series of shocking discoveries...