During the Korean civil war, sixteen-year-old Lee Haemi lives in a refugee camp in Busan, South Korea. Each night, she leaves her makeshift home to be with her childhood friend, Yun Kyunghwan, not knowing that Kyunghwan's older, wealthier cousin, Yun Jisoo, is determined to marry her. Both men are conscripted to go to war, and both returned injured. After the war, Jisoo asks Haemi to marry him, and seeing the marriage as the best way to protect herself and her family, she agrees. As he watches Haemi grow into a wife and then a mother, Kyunghwan finds himself working demeaning jobs while trying to rise through the modernization and upheaval after the war. When he reenters Haemi?s life, she is torn between her passions and her duties.