To her New York society friends, Mary Haines is the perfect woman. She is kind, considerate, and is able to balance her work life as a designer for her father's family business with her role as loving wife of thirteen years to renowned Wall Street businessman Stephen Haines and mother to preteen Molly Haines, all the while still being able to do volunteer work. But slowly, the problems in Mary's life, which she was previously unaware of, start to show themselves. Instead of her father handing over the family business to her as she expects, he instead fires her, believing her work is not of quality since she is spreading herself too thinly over all that she does. Worse, she finds that Stephen is cheating on her with a gold digging Saks perfume counter girl named Crystal Allen, of which her core group of friends are aware. As she still loves Stephen, Mary has to figure out what to do, with much advice from those friends and her mother, who knows more about what she's going through than Mary would have suspected. As Mary deals with this issue wallowing in her self pity, her best friend since college, magazine editor Sylvie Fowler, is facing her own professional problems, which impact what happens to Mary. It isn't until Mary meets agent Leah Miller at a retreat that Mary begins to figure out what she truly wants in life, how to achieve it, and what part she played in the cause of her own problems, not only with Stephen.