A married couple in California grapples with race, deception, love, and loss when their son comes home from a Guatemalan orphanage.

Contemporary art museum curator Julie Cowan’s life is far from perfect. Her pathologist husband, Mark, is distracted by his gorgeous young intern, while her hotshot new boss doubts Julie’s curatorial chops. And Julie’s six-year-old son, Jack (born Juan), may never recover from trauma inflicted by early life in a Guatemalan orphanage. At the same time, Jack’s birth mother, an indigenous Ixil Maya, navigates her own tumultuous path, beginning with surviving a horrific massacre during Guatemala’s civil war.

In this elegantly-woven braided narrative, both mothers must draw on fierce inner strength as they grapple with power and race, deception and love.