When a beautiful young Frenchwoman and a brilliant Americanactor meet in wartime Paris, their love begins like a fairy tale butends in tragedy. Suddenly orphaned, their threechildren are cruelly separated. Megan, the baby,adopted by a family of comfortable means, becomes adoctor in the rural Appalachia. Alexandra, raised in lavishwealth, marries a powerful man whose pride is inhis pedigree and who assumes that Alexandra is her parents'natural offspring. Neither of them has the remotest suspicionthat she is adopted, or what turbulent tragedy lurks in her past. And Hilary, oldest of the Walkerchildren, remembers them all, and the grief that tore them apart and cast them into separate lives. Feeling the lossthroughout her life, and unable to find her sisters, she builds an extraordinarycareer and has no personal life.

When John Chapman, lawyer and prestigious privateinvestigator, is asked to find these three women, he wonders why.Their parents' only friend, he did nothing to keep them togetheras children and has been haunted by remorse all his life.The investigator follows a trail that leads fromchic New York to Boston slums, from elegantParisian salons to the Appalachian hills, to the place wherethe three sisters face each other and one more final, devastatingtruth before they can move on.