After years of infertility, Emily Vogel, an ornithologist at Seattle’s Burke Museum, and her husband Adam, a sculptor turned university professor, face a medical discovery that retrospectively recasts the foundation of their marriage. For Emily, the revelation alters who they are — in themselves and to each other — while Adam maintains his belief that identity is something chosen, not merely inherited. 

As Emily seeks refuge in the museum’s collections, cataloguing anomalous bird specimens, Adam retreats into art and the unconventional family that raised him, trusting that care and attention can preserve the relationship. As each struggles toward a choice they can live with, other perspectives—students, coworkers, strangers, kin—challenge the couple’s increasingly diverging beliefs about belonging, responsibility, and desire. In the end, each must ask what they owe to the other when they can no longer agree on what their love means.