Tacee Leeman's mother and hearing were killed in a fire when she was ten. She's lived in a homeless shelter with her dad for the past eight years. But a hearing boy, Shane Presley, doesn't know any of her story. He just thinks she has bad hearing and volunteers at the shelter. After an incident at school that reveals everything to everyone, Tacee doesn't know what to do. And once she knows what Shane has been through, she starts to think that the fire wasn't an accident. But she's not sure. All she knows, for absolute sure, is that for all these past eight years, she's been alive... but dying.