When 23-year-old Eileen O'Malley meets charismatic naval officer Paul Archer in a Charleston department store, she doesn’t expect to fall so hard, so fast. But soon she has a ring on her finger and is following him to La Maddalena. Eileen joins a makeshift community of navy wives who are hell-bent on making the island feel a little more like home. But for Eileen, whose brother died in Vietnam, home is a loaded word, and she begins to love the place for all the ways it is not like where she comes from. Still, it doesn’t take long for her to be confronted with the complexities of being an American abroad. Soon, Eileen’s marriage falters and her loyalties begin to shift as she is drawn into a web of secrets --- and to a local journalist who forces her to imagine a life beyond the one she’s been handed.