Excerpt:
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| Hallie smiled at the
secretary, hoping that her demeanor was that of a public relations director going into a meeting with the president of the company and not of a woman who was going to make love to her boss in his office at four o'clock in the afternoon. "Thanks, Mary," she said shifting her notebook in an exaggerated movement from one hand to the other, feeling slightly embarrassed. She suppressed the urge to giggle, something she frequently did whenever she felt self-conscious, and
walked past the secretary's desk.
All in one day, thirty-five-year-old Hallie Marsh learns that the man she loves, works for, and is living with has found someone else—and that she no longer has a job, a place to live, or a car since she crashed it into a hedge. She retreats to her parents' home in the northern part of Florida to be consoled and to decide what to do with the rest of her life only to find out that her mother is planning to leave her father for
another man. Embittered, filled with anger, and wanting revenge, Hallie decides to take a year's sabbatical and write a novel that would reveal the unethical, if not illegal, real estate business practices of her former boss and lover. The focus of her novel soon changes, however, when she becomes fascinated with her new neighbors—four peculiar, elderly people who decide to buy an old run-down estate, fix it up, and live in it “just like family.” With this new
focus and the support of her two best friends, Carol Mathews and Gordon Sebastian Cooney, Hallie overcomes her feelings of rage, she is able to cope with her mother's sudden death, and she finds true love.
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