Nessa, now in her seventies, is back in England from the US to take care of her inherited house on the coast of Dorset. She arrives to hear news of human bones-a woman's bones-dug up on the beach, after a cliff fall. As she walks the paths of her childhood again, memories begin to return. Whose bones are these? Why does she have the growing feeling that they are connected with her? How does the present echo the past? What place do guilt and recrimination take in her present life-and who, apart from her childhood love, Ted, can help her find the truth of what really happened?