Claudia and Emma are two women of different ages, cultures, and times who, due to an exchange of energies occurring during a near death experience, awake in the body and lifetime of the other. Claudia is an attractive 47-year old writer of Cuban descent who moves from Miami, FL to Tacoma, WA with Mark, her younger, author boyfriend with whom she's lived for 10 years. She has a son and a daughter in their late twenties but Claudia's unconventional relationship has caused a rift in her family and her daughter has become an alcoholic. One day Claudia receives a call from home informing her that her daughter has tried to kill herself. Claudia reaches out to Mark for support but he has met someone else and ends the relationship instead of hearing her out. Devastated, Claudia wishes to escape from the cruel reality her life has become and runs to Wright Park while a storm is traversing the infamous Hurricane Ridge of the Olympic Mountains heading to the city with catastrophic intensity. In 1890 an identical storm passed through Tacoma the day when Emma Allen, the 22-year old naive daughter of banking pioneers, is also at the park. Emma has rejected the affections of Anthony, a young, educated man who offered her a stable life and instead falls in love with Frederick, a philandering married man with whom she had a brief affair that resulted in an aborted pregnancy. Running into Frederick has a devastating impact on her, and wishing herself dead, she collapses by a tree where at the same time in the future Claudia also succumbs in despair. Lightning strikes the tree and each woman awakes in the other's body and lifetime where they encounter people from their own time; Claudia finds Mark is the man in love with Emma in the past. In the present, Emma recognizes Frederick's envious wife. Dealing with the circumstances and the people around them each woman makes decisions and takes actions that alter the other's life according to predestined, hidden, desires. In the past Claudia meets the enigmatic character Helena Blavatsky who tells her that multi-dimensional travel is real and that she can return to her time, but the key to return is in the future. Claudia leaves clues for Emma in order to accomplish a switch and on the winter's solstice during a climatic confrontation for both, they each return to their own lifetime.
