William Hundert is a passionate and principled Classics professor who finds his tightly-controlled world shaken and inexorably altered when a new student, Sedgewick Bell, walks into his classroom. What begins as a fierce battle of wills gives way to a close student-teacher relationship, but results in a life lesson for Hundert that will still haunt him a quarter of a century later.

Betrayed by his fiancée and utterly alone, a young photographer struggles to reconnect with his mother, who can't remember who he is. Unexpectedly, he finds hope when he reunites with an old friend whose life has also gone far from planned.