On a Southern campus in the 1960's, four young, disparate women come together as sorority suite-mates and share a rare, powerful early friendship. There is Kate, with her elegance and grace; Cecie, the sensitive and sensible one; Ginger, the gorgeous, unbelievably rich girl who refuses to grow up; and Fig, the doting, diminutive, misshapen girl with the brilliant mind. As Fig watches from a distance, carefully noting everything down in her diary, Ginger embarks on a wild, scandalous life, and the bond between Kate and Cecie deepens. That bond is tested with the arrival on campus of Paul Sibley, a sexy and brilliant, half-Seminole architecture student. Kate and Paul fall hopelessly in love and begin planning for their future by designing their dream house; she doing the interior designing, and he the architecture. But when Kate moves to New York to begin their joint career, Paul writes to inform her that he is marrying Ginger instead. Plunged into agonizing despair, Kate rebounds into the arms of an affable Jewish architect, Alan Abrams, and, in her pain, breaks off all contact with her old sorority sisters. Twenty-eight years later, Fig plans a reunion of the four women at Ginger's home at Nags Head, North Carolina, the beautiful, weather-beaten house in which they all shared two idyllic spring breaks. Now the women return to recapture the exquisite magic of those early years and to share again the love, enthusiasm, passion and cruel betrayal that shaped them from girls into women. What they don't realize is that Fig, now a wildly successful novelist, has planned a very special surprise for her sisters; one that will irrevocably alter the rest of their lives.