Successful California attorney Terry McQuinn (Sinise) looks back on his childhood in Maine. He's the son of a widowed caretaker who is too engrossed in his work to spend much time with his son, possibly out of incurable grief following the early death of Terry's mother. When Terry's father dies, he returns to Maine to take care of and settle his father's small estate. While there, he also tends a house his father cared for when Katherine Wentworth (Richardson), a New York social worker whose parents owned it before their divorce, decides to show the house to her adopted blind daughter, Olivia (Jordy Benattar) and calls to ask Terry to re-open the house. Terry has flashed back to his boyhood and his original meeting with Katherine as a young girl when her parents came to the home one winter. He remembers going with Katherine and her father, a former professional football player, to deliver Christmas presents to hospitalised children, something her father did every year, until this night—after the deliveries, her father's car skidded on an icy road and inadvertently killed a mother and her child. Though police ruled it an accident and planned not to pursue charges, Katherine's father disappeared completely. Terry also discovers his own father kept many pictures of their little family for years after his mother died. When he meets Katherine again, Terry is taken by her warmth and her blind daughter's love of life, and learns her long lost father isn't dead as his brother (Gordon Pinsent) made known but, rather, alive and homeless, after having worked many years at the hospital where he still donated Christmas presents annually to children there. Terry becomes uncertain whether to tell Katherine her father is still alive, and Katherine is uncertain about falling in love with Terry.

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