Tracy Goodwyn, Director of Books and Documents at the Metropolitan Auction House in New York City, is the last of her art history best friends - Boston museum curator Avery and Chicago university professor Emma the other two - to have possession of the late nineteenth century Italian lace wedding veil they purchased together solely as an antiquity. The legend of the veil is that its owner will come into true love. While the veil seems to have worked with recently married Avery and Emma meeting their respective spouses when they had it in their possession, Tracy is less than skeptical in never really having believed in true love for various reasons, and in she and her musician boyfriend of two years Finn, her longest ever relationship, breaking up out of circumstance while she had the veil, they only having talked casually about the possibility of getting married beforehand. In planning a party at work to publicize an upcoming auction, Tracy meets high end restaurateur Nick Serchio, who she, at the last minute, hires as the function caterer, she reluctant to do so despite the quality of his food as they butted heads in a chance earlier encounter over their strong opposing feelings about New York issues. The one thing each can agree on is their love for the city, Nick, a third generation Italian-American whose love for the city is partly from the immigrant experience of his maternal "nonna", Gia. Beyond the auction house party, Tracy and Nick begin to bond in each helping the other with a prominent work issue: Tracy trying to find a museum to purchase an original handwritten draft of Emma Lazarus' "The New Colussus" made most famous by being engraved on the Statue of Liberty, it going to auction which would probably mean it being purchased by private buyer Carter Wainwright who would otherwise hide it in a vault, and Nick opening a new Asian-Italian fusion restaurant against Nonna's traditional Italian sensibilities. The question becomes whether romance-shy Tracy will be open enough to let Nick romantically into her life, especially so soon after Finn.
