In a hospice in Bury St Edmunds, a man called Daniel is slowly fading away. His friend Maggie sits with him every day; she holds his hand and she listens to the story of his life, to his regrets and to his secrets. And then he tells her about the children he has never met and never will, conceived with women he has never slept with, never even touched. Four of them, apparently, two boys, two girls. He talks of them wistfully. His legacy, he calls them. Lydia, Robyn and Dean don't know each other. Yet. And they are all facing difficult challenges. Lydia is still wearing the scars from her traumatic childhood and although she is wealthy and successful, her life is lonely and disjointed. Until an unexpected letter from her long-lost uncle reveals a shocking truth about her childhood. Dean is a young man whose life is going nowhere. He is jobless and about to have a baby with a girl who hates him. But then one afternoon, life flips over and leaves him somewhere he never expected to be- a single dad to an ill daughter and he is forced to re-evaluate his whole life. Robyn is eighteen. She is training to be a doctor and is determined one day to be a paediatrician, just like her father. She has never met her father. Neither has her mother. He was an anonymous donor, and that's exactly what she wants him to stay - a character in her own personal fairy tale. Until the day she meets the man of dreams and falls in love. He looks like her, he thinks like her, he even has the same freckle in the same place on his left hand. It could be just a coincidence, but she needs to be sure before she can allow herself to be with him. It's time for her to open the envelope her parents gave her on her eighteenth birthday. And Daniel's children slowly find their way into each other's lives...