There is a built-in difficulty convincing a woman you haven't talked to in 20 years that you've loved her since you were six. Compound this with the fact that the woman was your first-grade teacher and now, as a first-year college professor, you have her pleasantly unmotivated son in one of your classes and you have a disastrous encounter just waiting to happen.

This is the situation facing Jeremiah Curtin, and it is, perhaps, the defining complication of his life. But there are others. As if in a fated, almost doomed way, Jeremiah feels he is following the career path of both parents, a one-time pair of academics. But his mother moved out of his life when Jeremiah was thirteen and after his stoic father dies, Jeremiah is left to confront this nest of puzzles on his own.

It is when Jeremiah comes upon an abandoned house tucked away in the hills of the Hudson Valley that he feels an answering call to his many questions. The house and property slowly reveal their secrets to Jeremiah and become his new classroom, a place where he comes ever closer to discovering the meaning of love and commitment.