On the very day he is released from prison - a rainy October day in Madrid- Leonardo learns of his parent's death in a car crash. He returns to their empty town house, a rich young man now, but with a life to reconstruct out of shards and fragments. At first all he wants is to be alone in the big house, looking over books, papers and diaries, old photographs, the mute witness to his own childhood and his parent's wretched marriage. But in time this thoughts concentrate on the Quinta Blanca, the white house by the cliff edge where he was raised by his grandmother. She had nourished him on stories, especially on Hans Andersen's "The Snow Queen" about the boy stolen away and imprisoned in an ice castle by the Snow Queen.  He is rescued by his girl playmate, who restores his memory to him by removing the sliver of ice in his heart. When Leonardo revisits the Quinta Blanca at Christmas as the guest of its new owner, Casilda, he too has the sliver of ice removed from his heart by the one woman capable of doing so, and his own redemption is at hand.