“For the one you love? Anything. You unmake the world and build a new one. You do anything to give them what they need.”

After months of online research, Alice Scott has tracked down the reclusive former tabloid darling Margaret Ives and hopes to persuade the woman to let Alice write her biography. Imagine the unpleasant surprise for Alice when it turns out that Margaret might not want to tell her life’s story at all, and she basically wants to ‘audition’ Alice and another writer for the next month, before she makes up her mind. That other writer, Hayden Anderson, acclaimed journalist who won a Pulitzer for the last celebrity biography he wrote.

Since Hayden seems taciturn and generally disapproving of everyone, and especially Alice, Alice hopes that she, with her much more outgoing personality, might persuade Margaret to pick her to chronicle her eventful life. Meeting with the woman several mornings a week, Alice comes to realise that while Margaret has a story to tell, it doesn’t start with her own birth, but involves several previous generations of the Ives family, all with skeletons in their closets and delectable secrets which have never previously been uncovered.

Since they are both stuck in the small seaside town together, taking turns interviewing Margaret, Alice and Hayden keep running into one another, and as the weeks pass, Alice discovers that Hayden might not be so arrogant and unpleasant as she initially believed. Because of the iron-clad NDAs they’ve signed, they can’t really speak about the information they’re getting from Margaret, so it becomes more natural for them to talk about other things. By the end of the month, when it becomes time for Margaret to make her choice, Alice is no longer sure that she wants to be in competition with Hayden, and that no matter what decision Margaret makes, it’s going to lead to heartbreak in some way or other.