In the face of terminal illness, a retired Intelligence Officer breaks a lifelong silence to share his experience of fighting alongside Partisans in northern Italy during World War Two. His participation in one event, which caused dreadful harm to a local family and business, still haunts him. It is a shame he has lived with for too long. As his time runs out, he turns to his family, first to admit his guilt and then to share his plans to redress that wrong.
It leads his nephew, an aspiring young surgeon, on a journey that changes his life and disturbs the world of several who thought the past was past. In the search for truth and culpability it uncovers dangerous secrets, which turn the quest for atonement and reconciliation into a final reckoning, from which few will emerge unscathed, and none will forget.