Carola Martin (Thekla Carola Wied) has enjoyed a trouble-free marriage for the last 25 years with Dieter (Miguel Herz-Kestranek), the owner of a profitable furniture company; they have a daughter, Simone (Valerie Koch), and Carola has a successful career as a reader in an art publishing house. But her comfortable world collapses around her when she is suddenly made redundant and soon afterwards Dieter is fatally injured in a car accident - on top of which, Carola discovers that for many years her husband has been leading a secret double life and conducting a homosexual relationship with the lawyer Tobias Volperius (Heikko Deutschmann). Tobias attempts to be friends with her, so that they can mourn together the loss of the person they both loved, but Carola finds she simply cannot come to terms with the other side of Dieter's character. However, when the shady company secretary in Dieter's firm Viktor Lipinski (Fritz Karl) announces to her that the company is facing bankruptcy, she realises that whether she likes it or not she has to sit down with Tobias and take advantage of his legal skills in order to save the firm.