Aiko, a 24-year old Japanese woman, moves to London to study painting and meets Oliver, a much older, British artist. Oliver becomes obsessed with her, his new passion revitalising his art. When she finally agrees to visit his studio in Greenwich, their attraction becomes mutual. When she poses nude for him, the chemistry ignites. Their relationship is judged harshly by friends and family but their common interest in art strengthens their bond. Oliver's brother Nathan is particularly scathing in rebuke and Oliver becomes more self-conscious about the age gap between himself and Aiko. When he discovers an unsettling photograph of Aiko's mother and herself when she was 4 years old, she tells him that her mother died of bone cancer and that her father died before she was born. Oliver recognises the mother as someone he'd had a brief relationship with 25 years ago on a trip to Japan with his family and begins to worry that he might be Aiko's father. He secretly takes a toothbrush sample of her DNA and sends it away, along with his own, for testing. At about the same time, Aiko takes a home pregnancy test but keeps the result to herself. When they next meet, Oliver reveals his suspicions to Aiko. She is unnerved but believes he must have made a mistake. When he tells her that the DNA lab has confirmed that they share DNA, she panics and dashes out of the pub and down to the nearby Greenwich shore of the tidal Thames river. Oliver gives chase to console her and catches up to her when she collapses on the gravel beach. Scattered all around them are hundreds of bones that have washed up during the tide. Traumatised, Aiko screams and runs off down the beach. Oliver seeks solace in nature, sitting on the roots of an old fallen tree, but keeps flashing back to his relationship with the mother, completely distraught. Despairing in her dorm room, Aiko discovers a letter from her mother hidden in a Japanese puzzle box. Aiko realises that the letter is her mother's dying attempt to tell the truth about Aiko's father. In flashback, young Oliver and his brother Nathan meet Aiko's mother as a young tour guide. The mother and young Oliver spend the next day together, and make love that night. But in a final twist, the letter reveals that Oliver broke the mother's heart and in a moment of weakness she had unprotected sex with brother Nathan, whom she reveals as Aiko's true father. Realising that Oliver's DNA test would have shown shared DNA with either of the brothers, Aiko dashes back to Oliver's studio. When she arrives, the studio is empty except for the macabre sight of bones littering the studio floor and a fresh paint splattered over Oliver's showpiece painting and the words 'I'm sorry' scrawled upon it. She drops to her knees, stunned. In the last scene, gnarled roots of the fallen tree scratch at the sky like skeletal hands, the pattern of the inner core like a counter-clockwise swirl. Slowly dissolving over this image is a close up of a bathtub drain and as the root swirl dissolves away, a flow of blood begins to swirl down the drain. Whose blood? The audience is left to ponder whether a miscarriage or suicide might be the cause.