Cushla Lavery lives with her mother in a small town near Belfast. At twenty-four, she splits her time between her day job as a teacher to a class of seven-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.