A bear breaks into the Worthen cabin, and the incident convinces Lyddie's unstable mother to abandon the family farm.

A letter from Mattie Worthen arrives informing Lyddie and Charlie they have been hired out as servants and the farm leased away.

Lyddie is dismissed from Cutler's Tavern after the mistress returns early and finds her gone without permission.

Lyddie arrives in Lowell, is taken in at Number Five boardinghouse, and is hired as a weaver for Concord Corporation.

An experienced weaver named Diana volunteers to train Lyddie on how to operate a loom during her first day in the weaving room.

Lyddie's strength and endurance make her the top weaver on the floor, and Mr. Marsden singles her out as his best girl.

A shuttle flies from its track and strikes Lyddie in the head, knocking her to the floor and wounding her scalp.

Uncle Judah arrives at the boardinghouse with an emaciated Rachel and announces he has placed Mattie in the Brattleboro asylum and will sell the farm.

Mr. Marsden traps a feverish Lyddie alone in the weaving room and tries to assault her; she stomps his foot and flees.

Charlie arrives in Lowell, reveals he has been adopted by his employers the Phinneys, and announces he is taking Rachel back to Vermont.

Lyddie reads a letter from neighbor Luke Stevens in which he proposes marriage, and she is shocked and deeply offended.

Diana confesses to Lyddie that she is pregnant by a married man and must resign from the mill before her condition is discovered.

Lyddie finds Mr. Marsden assaulting Brigid in the darkened weaving room and dumps a bucket of water over his head.

Lyddie is summoned to Agent Graves's office and dismissed from Concord Corporation on Mr. Marsden's charge of moral turpitude.

Lyddie tells Luke Stevens she will not be marrying him but plans instead to attend Oberlin College in Ohio.

Lyddie Worthen's struggle begins when her mother abandons the family farm, forcing Lyddie and her brother Charlie into servitude. After being dismissed from Cutler's Tavern, Lyddie travels to Lowell, Massachusetts, where she becomes a skilled weaver at Concord Corporation and works tirelessly to save enough money to reclaim her family's property. Her hopes are crushed when her uncle sells the farm, her mother is confined to an asylum, and her siblings are absorbed into other families. Lyddie's position at the mill collapses after she defends a coworker from a predatory overseer and is dismissed on false charges. Stripped of her savings goal and her job, Lyddie must reimagine her future entirely. She ultimately chooses education over marriage, announcing her plan to attend Oberlin College and forge an independent life on her own terms.

Lyddie's journey from Vermont farm to Lowell mill to Ohio-bound student.

After escorting their mother and sisters away, Charlie returns to the farm and spends the winter working alongside Lyddie.

Lyddie and Charlie sell their calf to Quaker neighbor Jeremiah Stevens for twenty-five dollars and are welcomed warmly into his family's home.

A well-dressed factory girl in a pink silk gown visits Cutler's Tavern and tells Lyddie she could earn at least two dollars a week in a mill.

Charlie surprises Lyddie by visiting her at the tavern in the fall, and she is quietly dismayed to find him unchanged and small.

Lyddie overhears farmhands debating whether to claim the hundred-dollar reward for reporting escaped enslaved people traveling through Vermont.

Lyddie helps push a stagecoach out of deep mud, impressing the driver, who offers to introduce her to his sister who runs a mill boardinghouse.

Lyddie meets her roommates Betsy, Amelia, and Prudence at Number Five and learns the strict conduct rules imposed on Concord Corporation employees.

Betsy begins reading Oliver Twist aloud to Lyddie at night, waiting for her each evening so Lyddie will not miss any of the story.

Lyddie purchases her own copy of Oliver Twist and pastes hand-copied passages to her looms so she can read while working.

The mill speeds up the looms after the summer break, and returning workers find the increased pace exhausting and dangerous.

Betsy signs Diana's petition for a ten-hour workday before leaving the factory ill and returning home to Maine.

Despite her youth and frailty, Rachel Worthen is hired as a doffer at Concord Corporation to legitimize her stay at the boardinghouse.

A letter arrives from the Brattleboro asylum informing Lyddie that her mother Mattie has died, referring to her incorrectly by the wrong name.

After her dismissal, Lyddie buys a copy of Oliver Twist for Brigid and a Worcester's Dictionary for herself at the bookshop.

Lyddie stops at Cutler's Tavern on her journey back to Vermont and realizes she can no longer move backward into her old life.

Before Lyddie ever reaches Lowell, her life is shaped by encounters with generous neighbors and a glimpse of a world beyond rural Vermont. Her months at Cutler's Tavern introduce her to the idea of factory work and allow her to develop a friendship with the cook Triphena, while overheard conversations about slavery begin to trouble her conscience. Once in Lowell, Lyddie builds her life through small but significant moments: befriending her roommates, discovering literature through Betsy, and navigating the escalating demands of the mill. The secondary characters around her — Betsy with her doomed dreams of college, Brigid with her growing competence, the labor activists pushing back against the corporation — define the community that slowly changes Lyddie. As Lyddie's personal losses accumulate, including news of her mother's death, these relationships and experiences give her a framework for understanding what she wants from her future. The final chapter in this arc is Lyddie pausing at Cutler's Tavern on her way back to Vermont, realizing she can no longer return to who she was before Lowell.

The people and experiences that shaped Lyddie's world beyond the headline events.

Mattie's misspelled letter arrives announcing she has hired out her children as servants and leased the family farm to pay her debts.

Lyddie climbs into her dark family cabin for a winter visit and discovers a fugitive enslaved man named Ezekial Abernathy hiding inside.

Lyddie impulsively gives Ezekial the entire twenty-five dollars from the calf sale to aid his journey to freedom in Canada.

Triphena presses a pair of boots, a bag of food, and five dollars into Lyddie's hands as Lyddie prepares to leave for Lowell.

Lyddie signs a one-year employment contract with Concord Corporation and is vaccinated against smallpox as required by the mill.

Diana gives Lyddie paper, envelopes, and postage so that Lyddie can write to her brother Charlie and her mother for the first time since leaving Vermont.

Betsy confides to Lyddie that she is saving her wages to attend Oberlin College in Ohio, which accepts women as students.

Betsy sings a mill workers' song about refusing to be a slave, and Lyddie reacts with fierce discomfort at the comparison.

Mr. Marsden begins pausing during his rounds to touch Lyddie's arm and pay her unsolicited attention that puzzles and disturbs her.

Luke Stevens secretly delivers a parcel to Lyddie containing a letter from Ezekial Abernathy and fifty dollars — double what she had given him.

Brigid confesses that fear about her dying mother has ruined her concentration, and Lyddie gives her the money needed to pay for a doctor.

Lyddie privately tells Diana that she stomped on Mr. Marsden's foot when he accosted her, worried she may have put her job at risk.

Lyddie begins teaching Brigid to read using hand-drawn alphabet pages pasted to the loom, echoing the patience Diana once showed her.

After her dismissal, Lyddie looks up the word turpitude in her new dictionary, discovers how she was characterized, and is outraged.

Lyddie returns to her repaired family farm, and standing before the hearth in her mother's rocking chair, resolves to stare down all the bears.

Lyddie's inner transformation runs alongside the external events of her story, marked by moments of revelation that gradually shift her understanding of what it means to be free. Her encounter with Ezekial forces her to confront the parallels between her own labor and slavery, and her impulsive generosity in giving him her savings reveals a moral instinct that even she does not fully understand at the time. In Lowell, small revelations accumulate: Betsy's dream of Oberlin plants a seed, and Betsy's labor song strikes a nerve that Lyddie cannot dismiss. The gradual awareness of Mr. Marsden's intentions, her secret act of self-defense, and the dawning realization that the mill's power structures protect the wrong people all sharpen her understanding of the world's injustices. Her loyalty to Brigid ultimately costs Lyddie her job but marks a decisive shift from self-preservation to solidarity. By the novel's end, Lyddie has replaced one dream with a better one, choosing education and self-determination over returning to a farm that no longer holds the future she once imagined.

The key decisions and discoveries that transformed Lyddie's understanding of freedom and herself.