Before the snow. Before the glass house. Before the silence.

Valentina Rovira is a pianist with a brilliant future and a dark secret: the same hands that play Chopin with delicacy possess a lethal precision for forgery. When her father is unjustly imprisoned for someone else's debt, Valentina makes a decision with no turning back: to use her gift to forge a judge's signature and get him out of prison. A perfect crime... until it stops being one.

Miles away, Alexander Vane lives in his own private prison. Tormented by severe hyperacusis that turns the world into an unbearably noisy place, Alexander desperately seeks a way out of a social engagement that is destroying him. He needs silence. He needs control. And he is willing to pay any price to find someone whose existence does not hurt him.

This is the story of how their paths crossed. Her crime. His need. And the prelude to the contract that would unite them in the isolation of Vermont.