A widowed single father enters a new relationship carrying unresolved grief that quietly poisons every moment of closeness. Without meaning to, he measures the love interest against the memory of his late wife—how she laughs, how she parents, how she fits into the life he once had. The comparisons are never spoken outright, but they linger in pauses, in the way he corrects her gently, in the way he flinches when she does something almost right but not quite the same.