On his way to meet his son for the first time, hardened former war correspondent Henry Skinner is hit by a car after rescuing a child from drowning. He is rushed to hospital where he floats, comatose, between dreams, reliving the fairytales of his childhood and the secrets that made him run away in the first place. His son, Sam, a thirteen-year old synesthete with an IQ of 144, waits at his father's bedside. There he meets Eddie Tomlin, a woman forced to confront her love for Henri after all these years, and twelve-year old Madelyn Zeidler, another coma patient and the sole survivor of an accident that killed her family. As these four very different individuals fight, for hope, for patience, for life, they are bound together inextricably, facing the ravages of loss and first love side by side.
