“Seeing the Gregorys in America, standing with them in the graveyard, had brought everything back—the five years that she spent there, the family she called her own for that briefest of moments. The grief at losing them. The grief she had worked so hard to bury.”

Beatrix reflects on a recent trip to the US to see the Gregorys. This passage in the Prologue offers a snippet from the middle of the book’s timeline and immediately establishes that Beatrix has people in the US that are like family to her and that she grieves their loss from her life. Later, the novel reveals that the instance upon which Bea reflects in the Prologue is a holiday that Millie recommended to Beatrix in an attempt to make amends with her daughter and repair their relationship.

“What on earth had they signed on for? What must this be like for her? To be sent away from home, by yourself? Nancy wonders what kind of a parent could make this choice, although she knows she has no idea what it’s like to live through a war.”

After Beatrix arrives, Nancy wonders what it must be like to send one’s child away to a different country and what the ordeal must feel like for Beatrix. Nancy’s reflection brings out some of the differences between her and Millie: Whereas Nancy would never have sent her child away, Millie would have never received a stranger’s child into her own house. The passage also highlights the context of the war and the desperate measures to which it drove people.

“Every day he has asked, upon entering the flat in the evening, whether a telegram had arrived. Tonight, though, he doesn’t ask, even as she watches his hands thumb through the mail on the hall table. And so she doesn’t tell him, not yet.”

Millie hides the telegram that arrives with news of Beatrix. She feels resentment toward Reginald for forcing the decision to send Beatrix away and regrets doing so for many years.