Treasure is found in the most unlikely places.

The envy of all her friends, wife and mother Saphora Warren is the model of southern gentility and accomplishment. She lives in a beautiful Lake Norman home, and has raised three capable adult children. But she's also married to a successful, yet philandering plastic surgeon. It is for that reason that, after hosting a garden party for Southern Living magazine, Saphora packs her bags to escape the trappings of the picturesque-but-vacant life. Her planned destination is a neglected family bungalow on the Outer Banks.

Saphora's departure, though, is interrupted by her husband Bender's early arrival home and his words that change her life forever: I'm dying.

Against her desires, Saphora agrees to take care of Bender, who instructs her to take him to fight his illness in their coastal home in Oriental - the same house to which she had planned her get-away. When her idyllic escape is overrun by her grown children, grandchildren, townspeople, relatives, and a precocious neighbor child, Saphora's escape to paradise is anything but the life she had imagined.