Sophie Whalen is a young Irish immigrant so desperate to get out of a New York tenement that she answers a mail-order bride ad and agrees to marry a man she knows nothing about. Widower Martin Hocking proves to be as aloof as he is mesmerizingly handsome. Then one early-spring evening, a stranger at the door sets in motion a transforming chain of events. The first, pretty and pregnant, is standing on her doorstep. The second in the American Southwest, grieving the loss of everything she once loved. The fates of these three women intertwine on the eve of the devastating earthquake.