A town by the sea, somewhere. A woman, Anne Desbaresdes, the wife of a manufacturer, is with her little boy at a piano teacher's. There are screams in the street; a man has shot a woman in a café, and it is said that she asked him to do it. Anne enters the café and returns there repeatedly in the following days. She engages in brief conversations with a stranger about the murder, about the two of them, and how it came to be. The boundaries between the stranger's fate and her own blur. In her relationship with the stranger, the dynamic between the murdered woman and her killer seems to want to repeat itself.