A mother sits with her sister and three daughters at a hotel in South Africa. She is originally from South Africa, but she lives in Paris with her husband and family during the year. She has returned to South Africa to spend Christmas and get out of her husband’s hair while he cuts ties with the 19-year-old girl he’s been having an affair with. Consumed by her own shock at having aged and her dissatisfaction with life, the mother doesn’t think much of her sister’s tears as she gloats about her surgeon husband, nor does she notice when her eldest child, S.P., goes missing. S.P., a 9-year-old girl, follows a man whom she believes to be a Magic Man from her fairy tales into the men’s dressing rooms. There, he disrobes her and sexually assaults her. The mother realizes too late that S.P. is missing. S.P. only reveals what has happened years later, after her aunt has died in a car accident with her abusive husband. Thinking back to that day, the mother thinks that she will never forgive herself for how much she overlooked.