In 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sinks off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine's night storm. Helen O'Mara, pregnant with her fourth child, receives a call telling her that her husband, Cal, has drowned.

A quarter of a century later, Helen is woken by another phone call. It is her wayward son, John, calling from another time zone to tell her that he has made a girl pregnant and he wants Helen to decide what to do. As John grapples with what it might mean to be a father, Helen realises that she must shake off her decades of mourning in order to help.

With grace and precision and an astonishing ability to render the precise details of her characters' physical and emotional worlds, Lisa Moore reveals the story that unfurls around those two moments.