With two infant girls at home in Los Angeles, Nicholas Arden and Ellen Wagstaff Arden are on a plane that goes down in the South Pacific, three years into their love marriage and with two infant kids. Although the most of the passengers survive the tragedy, Ellen is believed to have perished when her lifeboat is washed away; her body was never discovered. Let's fast forward to the present day, five years. Nicky wants to be able to go on with his life, so he has Ellen legally proclaimed dead. The remarrying process is part of that process; he is now engaged to a young woman named Bianca Steele, with whom he hopes to spend their honeymoon at the same Monterrey resort where he and Ellen spent their honeymoon. Ellen gets picked up by the Navy in Los Angeles on the same day she was rescued from a South Pacific island where she had been stranded for the previous five years. Ellen has been there ever since. She requests that the Navy not publicize her rescue or contact Nicky since she wishes to handle everything herself.