Briony Tallis (Vanessa Redgrave) being interviewed about her latest book, titled Atonement. She explains how it is her last book because she is dying and she wanted to be completely honest about all the events of the situation. She admits however that she wasn't honest about one part. That she never went to her sister that day to ask for forgiveness and that Robbie was never there because he died of septicemia in France waiting to be taken to the hospital a few months earlier. She also says that she never got to set things right with her sister because she was killed in a bomb blast a few months after Robbie died. Briony admits that she has had to live with this truth all her life so she changed it in her book, in order to give Cecilia and Robbie their chance to be together in her book, if not in real life.
Through a terrible and courageous act of imagination, she finds the path to her uncertain atonement, and to an understanding of the power of enduring love.
