Pregnant at sixteen in the 1960s, Mary Frances McDonald was expected to bear her baby secretly and forget about it. Twenty-five years later, while trying to learn what became of her child, she discovers that The Vermont Home for Unwed Mothers she was driven to while blindfolded never existed. She returns to her Pennsylvania coal town to confront the driver, her mother.

But Joyce McDonald isn't talking.

The only thing Joyce appears to remember is nearly dying of shame over rumors that her daughter conceived a child upstairs in a dance hall in a fling with so many boys the father could have been anybody. In order to find the truth and her child, Mary Frances must unravel a tangled conspiracy.