In 1950s Canada, two farm girls — Grace and Avie — wait for the bus to take them home from college for summer vacation. They are enrolled in school not for intellectual purposes, but in order to find husbands. On the bus, Avie tells Grace about a dream she had: she had married her boyfriend Hugo and they’d had a baby girl who cried day and night. Annoyed, Avie locked her child in the basement, and then had another daughter, who was easier to handle. The younger daughter then found out about her older sister in the basement — but by then, the older daughter had become accustomed to her captive life. Avie has sex with Hugo because she thinks it will help her fall in love with him. Grace, meanwhile, stays a virgin to keep her boyfriend, Royce, interested in her. Unlike Avie, Grace is in love — and, in fact, Avie secretly pines after Royce too. Over the summer, Royce goes to visit Grace at her family’s farm. On the bus ride there, Royce spots Avie and considers getting off to court her. He realizes, however, that Grace is waiting for him and decides against it. When he arrives at Grace’s home, Royce is sarcastic toward her family and predominantly wants to find a way to have sex with Grace. When the rest of Grace’s family is away for the day, she and Royce sleep together, but Grace’s mom returns early and is horrified when she walks in on them. Royce angrily walks out and hitchhikes his way back into town; Grace asks him to take her with him, but he ignores her. Avie drops out of school to move in with Hugo, who has graduated. One day in the fall, now pregnant, Avie goes to campus to pick up a few books she’d left behind and learns from a former classmate that Grace has also dropped out, possibly because she developed colitis. Fifty years later — in the present — Avie is on a train from Toronto to Montreal to visit one of her six children. Hugo has been dead for over a year. As the women’s liberation movement took off, Avie had stayed inside, resigned to domestic life. The man who sits across from Avie on the train turns out to be Royce; they catch up, and Royce tells her about the time he spotted her from the bus on his way to visit Grace. He asks if she would’ve agreed to meet him then; Avie immediately answers yes. Avie recalls a letter she received from Grace during her first pregnancy. Avie had been put off by the somber tone of Grace’s letter and had not responded. She asks Royce if he’s ever heard anything from Grace. He responds no in a curt, cold manner.