The death of Vicente, a twenty-five-year-old disabled intellectual, forces his family to confront their worst nightmares. Vicente dies as he lived, in a state of extreme abandonment, provoking deep remorse in his brother Ginés. Although it is the early twenty-first century, Ginés is trapped in a love triangle and unable to admit his sexual orientation to his family, who live in rural eastern Spain and whose attitudes are stuck in the past. The shadow of guilt hangs over them all as a result of a serious incident that nobody ever mentions and dark secrets from the past. Their stories alternate with those of the older generation, of Juan Antonio, who fled from a concentration camp following the civil war and joined the anti-fascist guerillas, or his sister Angustias, who was under surveillance by the fascist authorities. The stories of these four generations overlap as the book alternates between different historical periods.