At the age of eleven, Jonas Blaum spends a year in Saudi Arabia with his parents and two siblings, as his father has been appointed as a doctor at a clinic in Riyadh. The Germans find it difficult to adapt to the foreign country. One day, the youngest child of the Blaum family, a girl who identifies as a boy, disappears without a trace and reappears shortly after, physically unharmed but disturbed and mute. The family hastily returns to Germany. In the summer of 2014, Jonas Blaum, now a doctor himself, struggling with addiction and plagued by doubts, travels again to the Middle East, this time to Amman. There, he is entrusted with a boy suffering from a mysterious illness. Blaum is unable to help the child, who reminds him of the greatest loss of his life, and when the boy disappears one day, he resigns himself to the situation.