The last thing Beck Foster wants to do is attend a party for her estranged aunt in the Florida Keys. One month earlier, Beck’s seemingly ideal existence imploded when her husband of 34 years announced he was leaving her. Now, so she has to sell her house, get a job, and somehow put her broken heart and life back together. She can’t do all that if she runs off to visit a woman she barely remembers. Or can she? Accompanied by her grown daughter who also longs for an escape, Beck heads to Coconut Key, where she’d lived the earliest years of her life.

While visiting her Midwestern hometown after many years, workaholic Karen Grace risks a few extra days away from the office, to get reacquainted with her extended family and childhood friends. She visits the crumbling homesteads of her prairie ancestors, and rediscovers their immigrant dreams and sacrifices. When her tyrannical boss fires her, she's 1500 miles from home, just one more middle-aged worker out of a job in a tough economy. To make matters worse, her husband just left her for his pregnant girlfriend.

When the Chambers sisters receive an invitation from their jet-setting aunt to spend the entire month of December at the family's cabin in Asheville, North Carolina, they have one question—why? The retreat, tucked into the Blue Ridge Mountains, may be the site of many happy childhood holidays and summers, but it also holds sad memories. The sisters and their aunt have spent twenty-five years avoiding the cabin and renting it to strangers. Why would Aunt Elizabeth want her "dearest darling" nieces to put their busy lives in three different states on hold and spend a month in the mountains?

Can a lingering regret and wonder about love that ended tragically decades ago be too great to ignore when empty-nest loneliness, stale marriage, and the stars "align" to give an opportunity to reconnect? As a dedicated, 50-year-old mother of three college-age and adult children, Callie Larson lives a storybook life of affluence and access just outside of Washington, DC. Until recently, her life's fulfillment came through her children to the point she barely missed her husband as he traveled extensively for work. But with all three children gone, her life has an unfamiliar emptiness.

Claire Turner finally has everything she wants. A successful business, a small bungalow near the beach, and the camaraderie of her two best friends. She's successful and independent - something she would have never thought possible before her husband's mid-life crisis and their subsequent divorce. When a rival business opens across the street, Claire worries that she could lose everything she's worked for.