— she thinks she's a real queen of Sheba, that girl.

In Emma's home, a great and unspoken secret resides, it rests between the walls and creeps along the floorboards at night, when she tiptoes to the front door and leaves scarcely without looking back.

The secret is a simple one, her father is the pastor of the local church community, while she is the girl who got Anne-Marie Rasmussen sent to the asylum with a case of the hysterics and perversion, while Emma's own part in the story was downplayed to save her father's face and position. Ever since, her father and she have been in constant war with each other to recognise the obvious fact: Emma is a lesbian. She refuses to marry, although her mother sets her up with plenty of fellas and her father threatens to disown her and leave her penniless. She will not lower herself to be with a man. Meanwhile, Anne-Marie has not gotten out of hospital and as the months pass, people begin questioning whether perhaps she never will, perhaps her disorder is 'chronic'. Emma hates her father, then. Almost as much as she hates herself.

That is when Ruth Toft-Thygesen enters, stage right. Women have recently been permitted to serve as pastors in the National Church of Denmark and Ruth is one of the first to be ordained, to the same church Emma's father works at. Emma knows he dislikes it, ever the conservative, but he has accepted the word of the parish council and when Ruth, originally from Aarhus in Jutland, has nowhere to live in Copenhagen at first, he opens his own home to her and lets her stay in the spare bedroom down the hallway in his large apartment near the church square.

That is how Emma meets her, new and idealistic and quiet and serious - everything Emma is not.

In the end, however, Ruth will prove to be everything Emma needs to move on, drawing nearer to some kind of understanding and forgiveness and to finally obtain a sense of peace with her situation.