Mickey Silver and Nicole Mahon are years and worlds apart, yet their lives intersect during a blinding and merciless New York City blizzard just before Christmas. Nicole is young, rich, suburban, a successful attorney, a faithful wife, and a mother of two small children, while Mickey is old, poor, and a survivor of Hitler's Europe, and of an often perilous section of Manhattan known as the Lower East Side. Both of them are lonely, both hunger for passion and renewal and find them, but not before being tested by betrayal, torment and sacrifice.