Consider Vivien in November 1922. She is 24, and a spinster. She wears fashionably droopy clothes, but she is plain and - worse - intelligent. At nearly six foot tall, she is known unkindly by her family as 'the giantess'. Fortunately, she is rich, so she can travel to London and bribe a charismatic London publisher to marry her. But, what he does not know is that Vivien is pregnant with another's child, and will die in childbirth in just a few months....

1961: On a summer's day, while her family picnics by the stream on, 16-year-old Laurel hides out in her tree house dreaming of a boy called Billy, a move to London, and the bright future she can't wait to seize. But before the idyllic afternoon is over, Laurel will have witnessed a shocking crime that changes everything.