Because of the now deep ties between the Howard and Quayle families, Anna and Russell are able to spend more time together and fall in love though there is a tacit understanding between them that their relationship cannot be expressed.

Meanwhile, Russell's wife Lily falls into a depression after her twin daughters win ballet scholarships to study in London.

After talking to Zoe, Lily decides that they should sell their business and she should return to academia, the career she wanted to pursue before she had children.

Anna later reveals that the suicide note was written years earlier and was accidentally sent instead of the Christmas cards she intended to post.

After seeing how Russell and Anna intend to be together and how Lily is forging a new life going to London to be closer to her daughters, Stephen and Zoe sit down and discuss the state of their marriage and their unhappiness together.

In 2012 Harrower was approached by Michael Heyward and Penny Hueston, editors of the independent press Text Publishing, who wanted to reprint her works.

The Guardian called the work "subtle yet wounding, and very much alive", praising it as "a graceful reply to the questions of what really shapes us, and what might actually constitute a wasted life.

"[3] The Wall Street Journal called the novel "a treasure from an unearthed time capsule" and praised Harrower as "one of the great Australian writers of the postwar era.