When sixteen-year-old Nouf goes missing and is found drowned in the desert outside Jeddah, Nayir--a desert guide hired by her prominent family to search for her--feels compelled to find out what really happened.

Determined to get to Nashville to find her mother in 1963, nine-year-old spitfire Starla Claudelle runs away from her strict grandmother's Mississippi home, eventually accepting a ride from a Eula, a black woman traveling alone with a white baby.