It is not until he meets Adrienne that Peter's pessimistic expectations about women fi nally lift. After she and Peter marry, all seems safe and ideal-until their two-year-old son, Nicholas, plunges to his death from the balcony of their Manhattan apartment.

As the aura of happiness that surrounds Adrienne and Peter abruptly shatters, they fl ounder in the darkness of grief, barely able to fathom their loss. Together they realize that their best hope for recovery is to have another child and, fourteen months after Nicholas's tiny white casket is lowered into the ground, Adrienne gives birth to a daughter. With great hopes for a new beginning, the family moves to Westchester. While Peter moves up the corporate ladder at a prestigious Madison Avenue advertising agency, Adrienne learns to tolerate his chronic inattention, womanizing, and lies. But when he is sent on assignment to London, he makes a fateful decision that leads to disastrous consequences he could have never predicted.

In this endlessly unpredictable odyssey of love and loss that probes the intricacies of two intertwined relationships that span twenty years and two continents, Peter now must face an uncertain future dictated by one careless act.