Ruby Jeffries is a driven and successful career woman who, like seemingly everyone who was born and raised in the bucolic Alabama town of Bluebell, can't stay away from home for long. Ruby, who has her own cosmetics line, returns to Bluebell after a decade's absence and befriends Zoe Hart, the New York surgeon turned small-town doctor. She clashes with Southern belle Lemon Breeland, partly because the two share a former flame. Divorced, she refers to her first marriage as a distraction from her career.