1950, Washington, DC. At Briarwood home, a down-to-earth all-female boarding home in the center of the nation’s capital where secrets are concealed behind white picket fences, everyone keeps to themselves. However, when Grace March, a charming and enigmatic widow, moves into the attic room, she attracts a strange group of neighbors into an unlikely friendship: the poised English beauty Fliss, whose façade of being a perfect wife and mother hides deep-seated inner wounds; Nora, the daughter of a policeman, who becomes involved with a shadowy gangster; Beatrice, a frustrated baseball star whose career has ended along with the WWII women’s baseball league; and the poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has joined McCarthy’s Red Scare.