A seemingly random leaf, floating on a quiet pond, Charlie Campbell is a bookkeeper of little account whose life is ordinary to the point of invisibility, but upon his death unlocks a truth that challenges reality. A once-wunderkind, Professor Tom Campbell has procrastinated too long and is now stranded in a small backwater college and deeply resenting it. Elly Asher is a rescuer, be it injured animals or broken people, but she cannot help herself. Now she hides from her past, tucked away in a small Texas town, afraid but ever hopeful. Warrant Officer Bob Vardis is jaded at the end of a long career at the Pentagon as the Sherlockian devil's advocate. Rigid and doctrinaire, his life is ordered, methodical and loveless... and he is exhausted by it. Whether the old man's life was real or imagined, his death is the catalyst that changes everything as lives of settling come to a final settlement.