Daniel Mannheim, an autistic high school savant, is introduced to Mark Flour, a retired German teacher living in a local nursing home, ostensibly to learn German. But what the senior in high school finds is a World War II POW veteran with a secretive past. Encouraged to improve his social skills, Daniel joins the writing club at the nursing home and works with the reluctant POW hero as a subject for an upcoming writing contest. Mark and Daniel develop a strong bond that probes their previous lives. Mark detests being thought of as a hero, and Daniel has much anxiety over graduation, future fears of living on his own, and parental pressure to attend the senior prom. Secrets are revealed by young and old alike, and the truth hangs raw emotions out like pictures at a public exhibition.

The action slips back and forth from battlefields of World War II to the farmlands of central Wisconsin in the 1940s to the contemporary dayroom of a modern retirement home and the halls of Oakwood High School, in Oakwood, Wisconsin.