The weekend after Thanksgiving, Chris Thayer finds himself packing up the last odds and ends of his quietly extraordinary life. After 22 years of gay marriage to Zack Ronan—and after raising widowed Zack's three kids as his own—Chris is suddenly a member of the Second Wives Club. An ambitious young woman at Zack's ad agency is pregnant with Zack's child, and Zack has decided that Chris' utility as a sexual companion and surrogate mother to his children has run its course.

What's a middle-aged gay divorcé to do?

Chris decides to take the venerable family dog and his ex-husband's guilt money to Salter Path on North Carolina's Outer Banks. As Christmas approaches, Chris begins to reconfigure his relationships with Trey, Andrea, and Schooner—Zack's kids, who have grown up calling Chris "Mom." Chris also makes his first tentative romantic connection post-Zack.