Kumi is mute, Japanese and twenty-five. Her family is in debt, her mother is sick, and her brother only fifteen. She's invited to a strange interview and offered a proposition in every sense of the word. Sign up for a year, do whatever she's asked, and at the end she'll walk with a million US. But the man behind the offer is nothing like Kumi expects, and all too soon she begins to wonder if Mr Barrett, her billionaire buyer, isn't her biggest problem yet.