This is the true story of Eleanor Henderson’s 20-year marriage, which was defined by her husband Aaron’s chronic illness. One day, out of nowhere, a rash appeared on Aaron’s arms. Soon, it had morphed into painful lesions covering his body. Eleanor was as baffled as the doctors. There was no obvious diagnosis, let alone a cure. And as years passed and the lesions gave way to Aaron’s increasingly disturbed concerns about the source of his sickness, the husband she loved seemed to unravel before her eyes. A new fissure ruptured in their marriage, and new questions piled onto old ones: Where does physical illness end and mental illness begin? Where does one person end and another begin? And how do we exist alongside someone else’s suffering?

In a house full of secrets, two babies --- one light-skinned, the other dark --- are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper’s daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a truck down the Twelve-Mile Straight. In the aftermath, the farm’s inhabitants are forced to contend with their complicity in a series of events that left a man dead and a family irrevocably fractured. Elma begins to raise her babies as best as she can, under the roof of her mercurial father, Juke, and with the help of Nan, the young black housekeeper who is as close to Elma as a sister. But soon it becomes clear that the ties that bind all of them together are more intricate than any could have ever imagined.

In the roiling, electrified streets of New York City in the 1980s, Eliza, Jude and Johnny each show up wanting a place to hide --- from everything that has gone wrong, big and small, in their short lives. These three, thrown together by their parents’ mistakes and their own, and by the accidental death of a teenage boy, find their regrets transformed into a single, covert mission.