At 25, as her wedding date approached, Laura Smith began to feel trapped. Not by her fiancé, but by the unsettling idea that it was hard to be at once married and free. She found in the strangely captivating story of another restless young woman determined to live without constraints both an enticement and a challenge. Barbara Newhall Follett was a free-spirited trailblazer who published her first novel at 11, enlisted as a deck hand on a boat bound for the south China seas at 15, and was one of the first women to hike the Appalachian trail. Then in December 1939, she walked out of her apartment, leaving behind a fraying marriage, and vanished without a trace. Obsessed by her story, Laura set off to find out what had happened.