Cushla Lavery lives with her mother in a small town near Belfast. At 24, she splits her time between her day job as a teacher to a class of 7-year-olds, and regular bartending shifts in the pub owned by her family. It's here, on a day like any other - as the daily news rolls in of another car bomb exploding, another man shot, killed, beaten or left for dead - that she meets Michael Agnew, an older (and married) barrister who draws her into his sophisticated group of friends. When the father of a young boy in her class, becomes the victim of a savage attack, Cushla is compelled to help his family. But as her affair with Michael intensifies, political tensions in the town escalate, threatening to destroy all she is working to hold together.