It's New Year's Eve, 1972, when a boat pulls up to the Maiden Rock lighthouse with relief for the keepers. But the doors are locked from inside, and rescuers find an empty tower where the clocks have all stopped at 8:45. Two decades later, the keepers' wives are visited by a writer determined to find the truth about the men who disappeared. Moving between the women's stories and the men's last weeks in the lighthouse, long-held secrets surface as the writer determines what happened, why, and who to believe.