The Story
A journalist. An architect. Six ex-wives. Six houses that refuse to stay quiet.
Sophie Kwan writes about historic houses for a Toronto design magazine, close enough to architecture to admire it and far enough away to avoid risking herself on it.
Then Charles “Chuck” Charleson asks for her by name. He is a celebrated architect, a man who has built homes around six marriages and watched every one of them fail.
Sophie’s assignment is simple on paper: visit the houses, interview the women who lived in them, and discover what the designs reveal. But the houses become evidence—of Chuck’s need to shape outcomes, of his wives’ different visions of happiness, and of Sophie’s own unfinished life.
The question underneath everything is deceptively simple: Can happiness be designed for someone else?