Adella is a little girl of six who has chosen not to speak; Laura is a child psychotherapist whose job is to put things right. We follow her work of trying to resolve the problem of this electively mute child through the detailed verbatim reports of sessions which Laura presents to a supervision group where we meet Matt, a fellow therapist, who also brings intimate accounts of his work with a highly anxious adult patient.

The story traces particularly Laura’s involvement with Adella and her colleague Matt, where we see her struggle with the difficulties of working with a totally silent child together with the confusion of her own emotional life as she gets closer to Matt. 

Both therapists are unsettled in their way by contact with their troubled patients and with each other and have to analyse their own feelings and behaviour. But the main focus is the often moving account of the development of Laura’s relationship to the child in the consulting room where the cause of her silence is explored and understood to bring about change and eventually help her find her voice.