After a moment of defiance at the factory where she works, Ella Fay finds herself at the Sharston Asylum. John Mulligan is a patient there as well, frozen with grief since the death of his child, but when Ella runs towards him one morning in an attempt to escape, everything changes. In the ornate ballroom, where the male and female patients are allowed to gather once a week to dance, Ella and John begin a secret correspondence.