When a horrific crime is committed, the media and the public express sensationalist horror. But those who knew the victim have to come to terms with a new way of being in the world. The victim's granddaughter, Amelie, finds herself surrounded by a silence that has its own eerie trauma. Her life of undergraduate study and sexual awakening is highjacked, and she finds herelf torn between the need for revenge and the search to find her place in a now-foreign world.