Aran Islands 1898.
Eighteen-year-old Rose O'Neill leaves her beloved Ireland and boards a steamer bound for New York City. She's starting a new life with Adam, the American soldier who's sworn to marry her. But when she arrives at New York Harbor, Rose finds herself abandoned, pregnant, and alone.
Scared and homeless, she takes a job at one of New York's luxury hotels, and gradually begins to see a future for herself and her unborn child. But when a deadly fire rips through the hotel, in one shocking moment Rose loses all she has built.
Rose's luck finally begins to change when she meets fireman Joe Kavanaugh, a man determined to win her heart.
Rose and Joe build a family and a business that takes them from the struggling Lower East side, to the glamour of New York's finest department store. If only Rose can let go of her past and the love she lost.
Rose has come from nothing and built an empire, but the outbreak of the Great War in Europe threatens to topple the dynasty which she has sacrificed so much to build.
Can she find her way back to happiness, and the future she set out to find a quarter of a century before?