Content Warning: The guide and source material depict graphic physical injuries sustained in war, intense experiences of post-traumatic stress disorder, and discussions of suicide. In addition, the novel features period-typical attitudes toward and language about mental illness, which this guide replicates only in direct quotations.

It is January 1918, and Nurse Laura Iven has recently returned home to Halifax, Nova Scotia, with a leg wound sustained near the front lines in Flanders. She now works for the three elderly Parkey sisters. She is recovering from her experiences working in an aid station near Ypres and the more recent trauma of a ship that exploded in Halifax Harbor, killing both her parents. She receives a package from the Canadian Army and fears opening it.

Laura returns to the large house where she resides with the Parkey sisters, Clotilde, Agatha, and Lucretia. She hesitates to open the package, knowing that the army sends a dead soldier’s uniform to his family. She fears it will contain her brother’s, Freddie, uniform.

Before she can open the package, however, she runs into Mrs. Penelope Shaw. The Parkey sisters regularly hold seances, and Mrs. Shaw is their newest client; she hopes to contact her son, Jimmy, who died in Belgium near where Freddie is stationed.