 Although she is engaged to Miles Ligard, a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer, at the beginning of the novel, he eventually admits that he is gay, and Beth leaves him.Almost immediately she meets and begins a relationship with Marcus Pirie, whom she discovers she had met in Rome when they were both children.When Beth discovers that she is pregnant, she and Marcus settle into a house owned by Juliet McCracken, who calls herself Miles' "spare old godmother."