One gloomy Sunday afternoon, Grégoire Bouillier answers the phone only to hear the voice of the woman who left him, without warning, five years before. She isn’t calling to apologize or explain the way she abruptly vanished from his life, but to invite him to be the “mystery guest” at a birthday party for a woman he’s never met.

Here is the true story of how a bottle of Bordeaux, a nonconsensual work of conceptual art, and a seemingly innocuous comment at a dinner party enabled one man to unravel the mystery of his being dumped, to explore how literature shapes and gives meaning to our lives, to let go of his heartbreak and his dependence on turtlenecks, and to -- in the most unexpected of ways -- fall in love again.