To the outside world, Sarah and Oliver Watson had the perfect marriage. Happy and successful, with three beautiful children, they seemed to have it all. But under the surface, Sarah felt lost, empty and inadequate. And one Christmas, after eighteen years of marriage, she walked out.

Left alone, Oliver struggles to cope with raising his three children. Seventeen-year-old Benjamin rebels with disastrous consequences, while fifteen-year-old Melissa angrily turns against her father, and nine-year-old Sam, the ''baby'', is too shaken to deal with his mother''s abandonment.

And then tragedy strikes once more when Oliver''s mother dies in an untimely accident and three generations of the Watson family find that they must pull together to cope, and maybe one day move on and love again . . .