When Eileen meets naval officer Paul, she doesn’t expect to fall so hard and soon, Eileen has a ring on her finger and is following him to La Maddalena. Eileen joins a makeshift community of navy wives who are hell-bent on making the island feel a little more like home. But for Eileen, whose brother died in Vietnam, home is a loaded word, she begins to love the place for all the ways it is not like where she comes from. Still, it doesn’t take long for Eileen to be confronted with the complexities of being an American abroad. Soon, Eileen’s marriage falters and her loyalties begin to shift as she is drawn into a web of secrets --- and to a local journalist who forces her to imagine a life beyond the one she’s been handed.

Richmond, Virginia, 1811. It’s the height of the winter social season, the General Assembly is in session, and many of Virginia’s gentleman planters, along with their wives and children, have made the long and arduous journey to the capital. At the city’s only theater, the Charleston-based Placide & Green Company puts on two plays a night to meet the demand of a populace that’s done looking for enlightenment at the front of a church. On the night after Christmas, the theater is packed with more than 600 holiday revelers. When it goes up in flames in the middle of the performance, four theatergoers make a series of split-second decisions that will affect not only their own lives but those of countless others. And in the days following the fire, the paths of these four people will become forever intertwined.

Atlantic City, 1934. Every summer, Esther and Joseph Adler rent their house out to vacationers and move into the small apartment above their bakery. Despite the cramped quarters, this is the apartment where they raised their two daughters, Fannie and Florence, and it always feels like home. Now Florence has returned from college, determined to spend the summer training to swim the English Channel, and Fannie, pregnant again after recently losing a baby, is on bed rest for the duration of her pregnancy. After Joseph insists they take in a mysterious young woman whom he recently helped emigrate from Nazi Germany, the apartment is bursting at the seams. When tragedy strikes, Esther pulls the family into an elaborate web of secret-keeping and lies, bringing long-buried tensions to the surface.