In Nell Lillington’s small Midwestern town of the 1870s, a young woman’s destiny is marriage. Nell, determined to escape matrimony, finds herself pregnant but refuses to divulge the father’s name.

Nell’s stepfather Hiram sends her to the Poor Farm so her baby can be discreetly adopted. But when two small bodies are found at the Poor Farm Nell suspects murder, and rethinks abandoning her own child to fate. Yet even if she manages to escape the Poor Farm with her baby, she may have no safe place to run to.