Nick Willard may be three years her junior but he has pined for Annie Kurtz since they were both prep school students. After 9/11, however, Annie joins the Marines, eventually making a split-second decision her superiors never wanted her to make and leaving her to wrestle with whether she should have followed orders or her conscience.

After her return from a combat deployment to Afghanistan, Nick, now a successful journalist, must grapple with his own conscience as he uncovers the reasons for the changes to the schoolgirl he has long deified. Together, Nick and Annie explore the tensions between love and friendship, even those between morality and law, as they come of age amid the psychological traumas that result when war makers sweep reality under a rug of ridiculous details.