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 school. The ex-soldier Castle is drifting. Their paths never cross, but their lives become intertwined.The summer holidays offer Verity the chance to get drunk and fall in love with a young Polish immigrant. But an unspoken tension between her parents – Anne, a university professor and Jim, a policeman – rises to the surface. When Castle’s 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 sees a different way of being and acting in the world.