A university film professor Jonathan Klein resolves a complex debt left by his deceased father which brushes against a New York criminal figure. Klein, a single parent of two headstrong teens in Southern California, also learns unsettling details about his late wife, about his brilliant Chinese national student, and about his close campus colleague who tried to commit suicide days before Yom Kippur. During the maelstrom, he rekindles with an old flame eager to leave Manhattan. The story, set during the onset of Covid-19, finds Klein straddling California and New York as his crisis of conscience overwhelms him.