In real time, an unnamed atheist and former hardcore porn star with a troubled childhood is driving under the influence of alcohol and drugs.

Hatching a suicide plan, he gets to know a visitor named Marianne Engel, who is a sculptor suspected of having manic depression or schizophrenia.

Throughout, Marianne reveals their ‘past’, and tells tales of love and hope, inspiring the Burned Man to live.

Finding love with each other, the Burned Man and Marianne flee the monastery and begin a new life together, getting married and conceiving a baby.

As their love story unfolds past and present, Marianne also spins romantic tales from across the centuries and around the world that defy pain and suffering and bring hope and succor to her deeply damaged friend.

Upon his awakening, Marianne resumes her carving, becoming more and more frenzied, neglecting to care for herself, the narrator, or her beloved dog, Bougatsa.

She returns and soon begins carving, but neither the narrator nor Marianne's friend and agent, Jack, are able to convince her to stop nor have her legally committed for her own safety.

After this revelation, Marianne commits suicide by walking into the ocean while the narrator watches, understanding that while she would have come back had he asked, it would have meant her mission- as she saw it- was incomplete, since her last heart had never been returned to her.

The narrator goes to a safety deposit box Marianne set up for him, in which he finds enough money to keep him going until she can be declared legally dead (due to the absence of a body) and two copies of The Inferno which seem to corroborate her claims; one is an early edition in the original Italian, singed around the edges and with a slit which seems to have been made by an arrow, while the other is a German edition which is later confirmed to both predate any known translation, but which holds the trademarks of an unknown scribe working at Engelthal monastery.

Lessons are learned, love is found, spirits are restored, and faith is revealed, all in the overheated cauldron of Mr. Davidson's imagination.