Sixteen-year-old Marianne, lonely and uncomfortable at the expensive girls' school she attends, finds an unexpected friend in her mother's new lodger, Abe Shonfeld, a young piano teacher who has been blind since birth.

Things are hardly perfect for Marianne. She and her mother seldom see eye to eye, and the attitudes and actions of other people begin to threaten the comfortable routine that she and her blind boyfriend, Abe, have established.