After working as head designer for Oscar de la Renta, Eugenia Ward started her own company when she turned forty, fourteen years ago. She is now a major name in evening gowns and wedding gowns, ready-to-wear and haute couture. But with the fashion business in major downturn, she has recently suffered heavy losses, and Eugenia desperately needs new investors—and new ideas.

Alexandra Bouvier is born in Paris in 1900, at the dawn of a new century. From an early age, she is encouraged to think for herself by her enlightened family: her father, a French doctor; her mother, an American nurse; and her maternal grandfather a highly regarded newspaperman back in the Midwest. At age fourteen, Alex's comfortable life is upended as war erupts across Europe. Her parents follow their sense of duty to the front, performing triage at a field hospital and confronting the horrors of poison gas and trench warfare.

Valerie Wyatt is the queen of gracious living and the arbiter of taste with a successful TV show. Since her long-ago divorce, she’s worked hard to reach the pinnacle of her profession and to create a camera-ready life in her Fifth Avenue penthouse. So why is she so depressed? All the hours with her personal trainer, the careful work of New York’s best hairdressers, cosmetic surgeons, and her own God-given bone structure and great looks can’t fudge the truth or her lies about it: Valerie is turning sixty.

Oona Kelly Webster has much to be grateful for. A striking woman with red hair and green eyes, she has a loving family and a job she adores, editing a prestigious line of books. To celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, she and her husband, Charles, have planned a visit to France. But then Charles drops a bombshell. He has been living a lie—hiding an affair for a year—and he is leaving Oona for a younger male lover.

Theodora Morgan is fashion royalty. Founder of a wildly popular online shopping service, she is one of the most successful businesswomen in the world, although she prefers to keep a low profile, especially over the last months. It was a year ago when the unthinkable struck her family: Her husband, industry mogul Matthieu Pasquier, and their son were kidnapped and held for ransom—a nightmare that ended in tragedy. The case has gone cold, despite evidence linking the crime to Matthieu's Russian competitors.