In March 2020, Martha McPhee, her husband and their two almost-grown children set out for her childhood home in New Jersey, where she finds herself grappling simultaneously with a mother slipping into severe dementia and a house that’s been neglected of late. As Martha works to manage her mother’s care and the sprawling, ramshackle property, she is pulled back into her childhood, almost against her will. Martha grew up at Omega Farm in a house filled with art, people and the kind of chaos that was sometimes benevolent, sometimes more sinister. Caring for her mother and her children, struggling to mend the forest, the past relentlessly asserts itself --- even as Martha’s mother, the person she might share her memories with or even try to hold to account, no longer knows who Martha is.

As Isadora, a novelist, and two of her sisters sift through the artifacts of their forebears’ lives, trying to decide what to salvage and what to toss, the story shifts to a winter day in 1910 at a train station in Ohio. Two girls wait in the winter cold with their mother --- the mercurial Glenna Stewart --- to depart for a new life in the West. As Glenna campaigns in Montana for women’s suffrage and teaches in one-room schoolhouses, Tommy takes care of her little sister, Katherine: trapping animals, begging, keeping house and cooking, while Katherine goes to school. When Katherine graduates, Tommy makes a decision that will change the course of both of their lives.