Life was perfect...at first.

Lavish parties, world travel, professional achievement, social status-Allison Creeley's life becomes all this and more when Clay Havershon makes her his wife. Everything she's ever wanted is right there at her fingertips, it almost seems too good to be true. And it is.

They say money cannot buy love or happiness. With one devastating humiliation after another delivered by the man she married and the man she realizes she never truly knew, Allison Creeley quickly discovers the unmentioned additions to that oversimplified saying. Money does not buy confidence. It cannot pay for self-worth, forgiveness, or compassion. And it has no power to repeat the past for a second chance to make the right decisions.

Beneath the overwhelming burden of her husband's constant infidelity and torn between who she wants to be and what's best for their two children, Allison blazes a heart-wrenching trail through the wilderness of gain and loss, alcoholism and sobriety, betrayal, motherhood, resentment, and longing. And on the other side, finding impervious friendships and unshakeable foundations in the most unlikely places, she discovers a certainty in one enduring truth. We only see the things in life for what they really are after we've made them our own.