It is 2003. After receiving an ambiguous text message from her lover that just says, “Later x” (3), Ellie meets friends for drinks. On her way home, her friend Douglas tells her that he is having a child with his girlfriend. He questions the morality of Ellie’s affair with a married man, leading her to retort, “you think I’m a bad person” (7).

The newspaper Ellie works for, the Nation, is moving to a new, more modern, headquarters. To celebrate this, the features section is going to run articles on how women’s attitudes have changed in the past 50 years. Ellie’s boss Melissa tells her to look in the newspaper archives for old material.

Ellie describes how she met her lover, John Armour, a thriller writer, after she was sent to interview him at a book festival in Suffolk. Ellie finds an intriguing love letter from 1960 in the archives.

It is 1960. Jennifer Stirling wakes up in hospital after a car crash. She has been badly injured and cannot remember anything. A man she is told is her husband comes regularly to sit by her bed, but she feels no connection to him. After several weeks in hospital, she is allowed to go home, a large, expensively furnished house in London.