When Lissy Shea meets Jack Porter, she tries for five whole minutes not to fall in love with him. Failing at this, she resigns herself to imminent heartache. When Jack inexplicably falls in love with her, despite her inability to hide her neediness and emotional outbursts, she lacks confidence in a happy outcome, but takes her chances. Jack and Lissy begin to build a life together, and she is lulled into believing that the love and contentment that she'd never known can be hers. She even becomes convinced that she is a good wife and mother. Her illusion is shattered when her family suffers a loss. She blames herself, and realizes that she'd been living a charade. She abandons any pretense of her own worthiness and lets her life deteriorate to the shambles she'd always expected. When Jack has obviously fallen out of love with her, and seems to disapprove of everything she does, she thinks that maybe she should leave. It's just a ploy, and she desperately hopes he'll call her bluff. But, when he lets her go, even encourages her, she's devastated and waits expectantly for the world to end. Not knowing where to go, she tries to find the place she had once been briefly happy, a cottage on Lake Huron and a hard-to-find waterfall where, as a teenager, she had shared a poignant and heart-wrenching moment with a cousin. Hoping to hide and heal before returning to her family, Lissy encounters kindness and concern from strangers. In a diner, she meets a man who, at any other point in her life, she wouldn't have looked at twice. Reluctantly, she builds a friendship with him, meeting him every day for lunch. Still stinging from Jack's harsh words and hurtful inaction, she extends her excursion and begins to make a new life for herself. Her new friend, Tom, becomes the one thing she had looked for all her life, but never found, someone who would be there for her. Lissy finds a home and a job in her new town, Pingree. She tells herself it's temporary, but begins to realize that, maybe, the only thing wrong with her life was that she had been living the wrong one. When Lissy learns of Tom's painful past, she finds herself capable of feeling compassion that had always evaded her. With his guidance, she learns to show kindness and forgiveness to others, and to herself. Through witty conversation and painful revelations Lissy and Tom build a profound friendship and Lissy discovers that damaged people get each other. The lawyer she works for takes on a client who has endured an unimaginable tragedy. At the same time a family obligation forces Lissy to deal with the cousin whom she had hoped to avoid for the rest of her life. The convergent events serve to shake up Lissy's life to the point where she has to make a decision. Should she go back to the husband she adores and be the mother her children deserve, or should she stay with the first man whose happiness means more to her than her own? Little does she know that it's Tom, himself, who will make the choice for her.