When, in 2003, Mikel, the narrator, and Thomas Lilienstein meet at university, the young couple is soon to be separated for professional reasons. They split up before they really have time to get to know each other. Five years later, when they finally meet up again, Thomas mentions the name of a city: K., or Khila, where he hopes Mikel will come to live with him. As a landscape architect, Thomas will continue his sketches of the park that has been haunting him for years, while Mikel will write her first novel, about their love for each other.  Once in Khila, the novel becomes a mission for Mikel, and one that obsesses her all the more in that Thomas is increasingly absent. He can usually be found in Saint-Nolse, the town where he lived as a teenager with his mother, Sylvia Lilienstein, a famous landscape architect who casts a shadow over the entire novel. That absence – which hides others – is distressing for Mikel, who slowly gets sucked into a maze that is both twisted and fascinating. She will gradually get closer to Thomas’s friends, and confront the tragedy of their shared past in order to paint a diffracted portrait of her companion. For at the heart of the Lilienstein’s lives lies a vacuum caused by a paralyzing, moral debt, the kind that gets handed down for posterity.