On the coast of Rhode Island in 1978, the Winter family lives in a decaying farmhouse within view of the Atlantic Ocean. When family patriarch Jim Winter inexplicably commits suicide one January morning, his wife, Helen, teenage daughter, Joyce, and fisherman son, Dale, are left to pick up the pieces. Like the man whose life insurance is worth more than his life, Helen Winter knows that cashing in on the value of their oceanfront property would be both the salvation and destruction of the Winters, who have farmed this seaside land for three centuries. Cousin Ludlow Winter gives her a job in...