Kate McKinnon is thirty-six and mother to five-year-old Toby. She has a small but thriving business catering for private clients. Her life is on an even keel. That is, until she gets a job cooking lunch at the Foreign Office and has her first fateful meeting with Oliver Stapler, Secretary of State. He's powerful and charismatic, but also married and a father and totally out of bounds, yet she falls for him. When a journalist spots them together, he alerts the gutter press. Who cares whether Kate's affair with Oliver is true or not? It's a great story and will shift a ton of newspapers — and destroy several lives in the process.

Three single women in their fifties meet when they join a choir. Lucy, recently widowed, is a cook and food journalist; Joanna, a successful business woman, never married; Rebecca is a divorced interior decorator. Each of the women is at a crossroads and they quickly form a bond.