People have told me my face has a far-off look. When I catch myself in a mirror, I look like someone who grew up in a place nobody ever drove past, a place with a sky like a blank TV screen...' Emily is nineteen. It is her last summer before going to university and she has come back home to a family on the verge of disintegration. She craves genuine feelings, happiness, but her experiences have left her jaded and cynical, just like the friends she hangs out with, and her beautiful but damaged boyfriend Tom. Watching her parents' unhappy marriage, she has absorbed its lessons too well. Love is fleeting. Sex, and divorce, are easy. Rely on nobody. Emily begins an affair with Simon, a decision made in a moral vacuum. But by the end of the summer she will be forced to confront the terrible consequences of her actions, both for herself and those she loves.