The Portrait of a Stranger

On Ethan Sterling's twenty-eighth birthday, a guest presents him with a beautiful woman who resembles his dead first love, right in front of his wife. Raised as an orphan by the Sterling family, she has endured such humiliations for years, but this time she smashes the champagne tower, wrecks the banquet, and leaves the ring behind. Ethan tosses it to the woman and orders the butler to have his wife taught etiquette.

She packs a suitcase and returns alone to a remote southern town, where she rents a small courtyard. Her neighbour, a young painter named Lucas Miller, helps her with the local dialect, and she begins to feel her twenty-five years again, planting Chinese roses and resting in a rocking chair.

Meanwhile, Ethan learns her number is no longer in service. At a famous painter's exhibition, a portrait of a side profile makes him lose his composure, and he offers an astronomical price to buy it.