For six weeks after a riding fall, Mila Shepard lies in a medically induced coma, hearing every word in the room while she cannot move or speak.
Jason, heir to a Baltimore shipping fortune, spends each night at his wife's bedside, where Bethany Wilkes, the woman hired to replace Mila at the family foundation, keeps vigil too.
He never touches Bethany, but he gives her his fears, his secrets, and the self he stopped offering his wife, then admits he does not know whether he ever loved Mila.
Mila wakes and says nothing for four days; on the fifth, she tells Jason what she heard and leaves him.
From a cottage on a friend's horse farm she learns to stand, walk, and ride again, and she takes recording equipment unused for six years back out to make the audio documentary her career should have been.
His money, surgeons, and flowers never get him through her door, but a stroke that leaves his father in the same kind of bed, able to hear and unable to answer, forces Jason to face what Mila endured and draws him back toward the life she left.
