The book starts with a woman waiting to board a ferry and she has doubts. While she waits, her thoughts go to three names: Bea, Marissa and Emma.
The first chapter takes her to 1970-1972. Bea is a seventeen-year-old girl living in London with her parents. Even though she has always been told not to walk through the park, she disobeys her mother as she likes feeding the ducks. Then she meets a boy, Ciaran O'Neill. Ciaran is an Irish young man who lives in London with his father and his brother, Fergal. His four sisters are in Ireland. The plan is for Ciaran to go to university, and that is why he is studying a lot. Bea knows that her family think that her next step in her education is to do a secretarial course, and Ciaran tells her that maybe she should study to be a nurse just like one of his sisters wants to do.
Bea and Ciaran become close and that friendship turns into a romance. Bea knows her parents will disapprove so she doesn't mention Ciaran, and the boy also keeps quiet as his brother will think a girl will distract him from his objective to go to university. Ciaran and Bea go to his flat when that summer his brother and father are in Ireland.
Then Bea's mother discovers that she is pregnant. Her father contacts the O'Neill and he tells Ciaran that he went to the flat but Ciaran is not there as he has left for Ireland. Bea is sent to the Cotswolds with an aunt, and she keeps writing to Ciaran but she never gets a reply. When she goes into labour, she is sent to a nursing home where she has her boy, but the boy is given up for adoption. Bea calls him Patrick and when he is snatched from him, she is very upset.
The girl that returns to London is not the same. She doesn't do the secretarial course but starts working for a photographer. She moves to a flat with other girls, and she goes out with boyfriends and enjoys the gay life of a young woman in the 1970s, but she never forgets Patrick.
Very intense start. I wonder what really happened to Ciaran. I think that he may not know about Bea and the baby, and I'm sure he was told some good lies.
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