The story begins in London in 1913. A little girl is crouched behind storage barrels on a ship’s deck. She’s been told to stay there and remain silent. The girl has been brought to the ship by a woman called the Authoress who lives in a little cottage on the far side of the family estate. The ship begins moving out of port, but the Authoress doesn’t return.

The scene shifts to Brisbane, Australia, in 1930. A man named Hugh is contemplating his daughter Nell’s upcoming birthday party. She’s the oldest of five and is planning to marry her sweetheart, Danny. Hugh feels it’s time to tell Nell an important secret. He “transferred the secret he and her mother had kept for seventeen years […] Watched as the bottom fell out of her world and the person she had been vanished in an instant” (11).

The story leaps forward in time to 2005 in Brisbane. A young woman named Cassandra is keeping watch beside her grandmother Nell’s hospital bed. The old woman is dying. Nell begins confusing the present with the past: “Why, as she neared her life’s end, her grandmother’s head should ring with the voices of people long since gone” (14).