Eighty-six year old Joyce Sparks looks back at her life and the terrible choices she made unwittingly, in order to protect the men she loved. Joyce grew up in a small town in Ontario, in the 1940s. Her first love, flamboyant Freddy, outrageously dressed, left for New York and Broadway. Devastated, she married safe, dependable Charlie, and they had a son, John, whom she adored. When John started to show the same tendencies as Freddy, Joyce became panic stricken and created barriers around him to protect him from himself and from the outside world, thereby denying her son his rightful identity. Unfortunately this misguided protective love created a void between them that became insurmountable. Sixty years later, would Joyce forgive herself?

Lyrical in its execution, devoid of sentimentality, the novel movingly captures the constricting emotions of a mother, a mother caught in the web of a particular time, a time when public disclosure of homosexuality was taboo.