When a beautiful young Frenchwoman and a brilliant American  actor meet in wartime Paris, their love begins like a fairy tale but  ends in tragedy. Suddenly orphaned, their three  children are cruelly separated. Megan, the baby,  adopted by a family of comfortable means, becomes a  doctor in the rural Appalachia. Alexandra, raised in lavish  wealth, marries a powerful man whose pride is in  his pedigree and who assumes that Alexandra is her parents'  natural offspring. Neither of them has the remotest suspicion  that she is adopted, or what turbulent tragedy lurks in her past.   And Hilary, oldest of the Walker  children, remembers them all, and the grief that tore them   apart and cast them into separate lives. Feeling the loss  throughout her life, and unable to find her sisters, she builds an extraordinary  career and has no personal life.

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