When Kate Fansler is offered the exciting prospect of writing a biography of Gabrielle Foxx, the obscure and enigmatic wife of a great modernist author, she accepts. But what she discovers when she meets three charming women connected with the Foxx family since childhood is a veil of secrecy that hides a fantastic pattern of events, a shocking secret that fifty years have done nothing to defuse, and a strange truth that she can never reveal.