James O'Neill, a former war correspondent, is now a highly successful novelist living in Paris after a failed marriage. He has recurring dreams of Lynnie Slattery, his first love whom he left in Chicago twenty years before, and he has been unable to resolve the cultural and family conflicts of his childhood. On a stopover in Chicago while returning to Paris from a movie conference in Los Angeles, O'Neill is irresistibly drawn to the lake resort where he and Lynnie spent their summer vacations. There he encounters Lynnie again, a widow with five children, now forty and still brash and self-assured, yet vulnerable.