A hot summer day: two people make their way to a quiet town on the wild Northumberland coast. Sixteen year-old Verity is coming home from boarding school. Castle is a drifter, an ex-soldier cut loose after tours of Iraq. Although they never meet, their lives become inexorably intertwined. The summer holidays offer Verity the chance to get drunk and fall in love with Karol, a young Polish immigrant. But an unspoken tension between her parents – Anne, a university professor and Jim, a policeman – rises to the surface. When a dead body washes up on the coast and Jim is tasked to lead the police investigation, the silence around Jim’s experience training police in Iraq is broken. Verity must come to terms with her father’s role in the torture of prisoners and her mother’s refusal to face Jim’s guilt. As Verity looks out to the ocean’s horizon, she knows she must find a new path: a different way of being and acting in the world.