In their too-expensive rented duplex on a tree-lined Vancouver street, Pauline Thorne and her husband hang on to middle class life by a thread. His job in finance is gone. So is their townhouse and their savings. He now manages a factory for his father and she writes freelance menu copy at home in their six-year-old's former nursery. It is not a good time to search for meaning. But when widower Arthur Dean moves in next door, suddenly it is. Home, the architecture of happiness, the search for meaning and the transformative power of longing propel and shape their lives over the course of a year that begins at one late summer wedding and ends at another. Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said: "The will to become that self which one truly is, is indeed the opposite of despair." But do we dare? Pauline dares.