Alice Loudon lives a comfortable life in London - a nice, dependable boyfriend Jake (Jason Hughes), good friends and a successful career. Everything changes one morning when she locks eye with a handsome man in the street. She finds herself following him to a nearby bookstore where she discovers he is revered mountaineer Adam Tallis (Joseph Fiennes).

Within days, Adam proposes and Alice, carried away by their intense physical passion, abandons the life she had established for herself and agrees to marry him. Good-looking, famous and above all devoted, it seems the only shadow in Adam's life is the guilt he feels over his former girlfriend, who died whilst climbing with him. However, when a series of anonymous letters begin to arrive, Alice's happiness is threatened as she realises she knows virtually nothing about the man she loves...