During the school year, 39-year-old Dolly lives in Boston, where she is a kindergarten teacher, a part-time Uber driver, and a call-center employee. This summer, she and her 13-year-old son, Gus, have returned to her Rhode Island hometown of Whitfield from Boston for the season after a fire at the home of her father, Freddie, and her brother, Christopher. She and Gus usually spend about one weekend per month in Whitfield, during which she does laundry and small repairs on the family home. The Brick Fish House has been in her family for four generations, but her father is still in debt from a failed expansion attempt years ago. During a shift at the fish market, she takes a call for her side job with Good Sports, a sporting goods company. Later, Freddie asks Dolly to deliver shrimp to the wealthy Whitfield family at their estate, Eight Oaks.

The opulence of the estate reminds Dolly of her estranged mother, who was dissatisfied with the Bricks’ working-class life and obsessed with wealth, particularly that of the Whitfields. While biking back from Eight Oaks, Dolly finds Stewart Whitfield on the side of the road with a flat tire. Stewart, the heir to the Whitfield fortune, doesn’t know how to change a tire, so Dolly does it for him.