The plot concerns the search by film star Lili (Phoebe Cates) for her natural mother, who surrendered her for adoption as a newborn.
[2] The story opens circa 1980 at an abandoned chateau in the Swiss Alps, once a prestigious boarding school, L'Hirondelle.
The story flashes back to 1960, introducing schoolgirls Pagan Trelawney, Judy Hale, and Maxine Pascal.
Each becomes entangled with a man – Pagan with Prince Abdullah of Sydon, Judy with banker Nick Cliffe, and Maxine with ice hockey player Pierre Boursal.
On their behalf, Maxine's aunt, Hortense Boutin, agrees to pay money to Felix and Angelina Dassin, a French couple who consent to raise the child until her real mother establishes herself and can come back for her someday.
The three girls, on the verge of success in their respective careers, receive a report that the child has been killed in an auto accident.
She was placed in a detention camp on the Eastern Bloc, where she spent the next ten years before finally escaping and eventually transforms herself into a film sex symbol.
Employing a private investigator, Lili tracks the payments to her adopted parents to Hortense, and through her, finds out about the three school friends and their pact.
Pagan Trelawney is now Lady Swann, a British aristocrat and the wife of a cancer researcher; Judy Hale has become a journalist, war correspondent, and publisher of Lace magazine; while Maxine Pascal is now the Countess de Chazalle, a French socialite.
After Hortense's funeral, which Maxine, Pagan and Judy all attend and where she witnesses the extent of their estrangement from one another, Lili inveigles herself in the lives of the three women, promising each of them something of value: for Judy, an exclusive interview for her magazine; to Pagan, a very sizable donation to her cancer society charity and for Maxine, to stop dating her son.
The second part of the mini-series is driven largely by flashbacks to the three women's young adulthood, charting their career successes and returning occasionally to the present where all three are in the company of the woman who claims to be the abandoned daughter.
Later in the hotel bar, Judy, Pagan and Maxine all confirm that Lili was telling the truth and they all humorously agree that she is better than all of them put together.
We learn in the end that Lili's father is Prince Abdullah of Sydon, who raped Judy on her way back to school after a one-night stand with Nick Cliffe, who was already engaged.