Wren, a waitress in Toivola, Minnesota, loses her job the night she throws whiskey in Dashiell Kestrel's face and slaps him for humiliating a bride candidate. The cold young head of the Kestrel Group is impressed and offers her one million dollars to pose as his fiancee for a year. Wren negotiates every clause herself - hand-holding, hugs, a separately priced kiss, her own bed - and moves into his Palm Beach mansion, a house still frozen around the death of his perfect older brother Julian. His mother Cecily apologizes for existing, his aunt Della plots to throw her out, his father measures him against a ghost. Wren refuses to be managed: she pushes Cecily to stand up for herself, turns Della's own trust units into fifteen million dollars of debt, and revives Dash's failing hotel with her family's supper-club recipes. Between contract and habit, the two stop pretending. But the deepest wound in the house has never been spoken, and the matriarch Imogene is coming home.
