In turn-of-the-20th century Texas, when Lizzie Bates and Mattie McBride meet at the Berachah Home for the Redemption and Protection of Erring Girls, they form a friendship. A century later, Cate Sutton, a reclusive university librarian, uncovers the hidden histories of the two troubled women as she stumbles upon the cemetery on the home's former grounds and begins to comb through its archives in her library