Vanessa was fifteen when she had an affair with a forty-two-year-old literature teacher, Mr. Strain. Now she is thirty-two and they have a warm and friendly relationship. When one of Strain’s former students accuses Strain of harassment and calls on everyone who knew the teacher from this side to open up, Vanessa faces a painful choice: remain silent, refusing to consider herself a victim and continuing to believe in voluntariness and the purity of those relationships, or rethink the events of the past and face the ruthless truth. But if not love, then what was it?