Nancy and Katrina retrieve the badly injured Baby Tri and hide in a thicket of brush. As Katrina sings to comfort the terrified girls, a man shoots her in the shoulder. The shooter is a white man disguised in paint with one dark and one green eye. Katrina pleads with the shooter to spare the children’s lives, stressing their respective ages.

A uniformed man on horseback then arrives and tells the shooter, Brother Robison, to execute his duty. The uniformed man offers to take Tri to the children’s wagon. Robison argues that Nancy is only four years old, not six as her mother stated. This convinces the officer to take both girls to the wagon, saving Nancy from being killed. As Nancy is pulled away, her mother’s wedding ring comes off in her hand. A moment later, she hears a final gunshot from behind her.

In a wagon filled with crying children, Nancy holds the badly injured Baby Tri. To cope with the horror, Nancy clutches her mother’s ring and forces herself to believe the event is just a bad dream. 

The wagon driver, an older man with a scarred lip, tries to comfort the children, telling them they are heading to the Hamblin ranch where they will get food and water. Nancy pretends he is her father. After Tri falls asleep, Nancy holds her hand as she promised her mother and quietly sings a song her father used to sing.

The novel returns to the present in 1860. Lucy listens as Vick confesses his role in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. He reveals that the attackers were mostly white Mormon militiamen disguised with paint. Only Chief Kanosh and a few Paiute men remained at the Meadow; the rest had returned to their village with their dead and injured after stampeding the cattle. The surviving Paiute men were angry at the Mormon leaders for lying to them, but the militia leaders dismissed them before giving orders to their own men. 

Under the command of leaders like Isaac Haight and John D. Lee, the militia took an oath of secrecy, planning to blame the Paiutes for the massacre. Vick recounts how they lured the emigrants out with a false promise of safety, then systematically executed the men, women, and older children. He confesses that he shot a mother hiding in the brush with her two children, revealing that the children were Nancy and the infant Tri. Vick saved Nancy by lying about her age. The baby with the mangled arm became the girl they adopted and named Amina. Vick explains that after the massacre, the surviving children were distributed to Mormon families, and that the Army officers who visited were carrying photographs were investigating the children who were missing from the mass grave they uncovered. The revelation shocks Lucy.

At Corn Creek, Sally and Inola enact their plan. Earlier, U.S. Army men tried to persuade the Paiutes to testify about the massacre, but Kanosh refused. During a midsummer celebration, Kanosh speaks of the Army’s visit, reaffirming his fearful commitment to the oath of silence he made with the Mormons. Sally then publicly confronts him, calling him a liar for blaming the emigrants for cattle deaths that were actually caused by locoweed. She accuses him of being a coward and a puppet of Brigham Young. When an enraged Kanosh lunges at her, Inola intervenes, pretending to be furious with Sally. Grabbing a club, Inola drags Sally into the darkness, creating the appearance of a violent punishment that is actually a cover for Sally’s escape.

Emma Willis wakes in the night. She puts on Peach’s ring and recognizes it as her mother’s wedding ring, which came off in her hand during the massacre. The touch of the ring unlocks her suppressed memories of the massacre and her true identity as Nancy Huff. She remembers her real name, her family, and her cousin, Triphena, who is now called Amina. 

Nancy confronts a terrified Peach, who confirms Nancy arrived at their home years ago, bloody and traumatized, screaming what Peach heard as “try.” Nancy now understands she was crying “Tri.” The conversation triggers another memory of the first time Nancy met Brother Robison and her adoptive father.

As her memories flood back, Nancy recalls the scene at the Hamblin ranch where her adoptive father, a streak of black paint still on his beard, took her from Brother Robison. She now remembers that Robison was the man in paint with two-colored eyes who pulled her and Tri away from her mother and then shot her. Overwhelmed and realizing she can no longer live in the house of a mass murderer, Nancy tells her sleeping sisters she loves them, puts on her shoes, and flees into the night.

Tormented by Vick’s confession, Lucy goes to their son Proctor’s grave in their orchard. She now understands the source of her adopted daughter Amina’s trauma and why the Paiute women, including Sally, stopped visiting. Horrified that Vick and the other men have maintained their oath of silence and blamed the massacre on Indigenous Americans, Lucy feels complicit in their sin. When her daughter Adelia finds her, saying Amina is crying for her, Lucy resolves to act. Believing it is her duty to repent, she decides to reveal the truth about the surviving children.

Nancy runs to the Robison farm and hides, watching as Lucy Robison comforts a crying Triphena in the orchard. She then sees Vick approach his wife, who recoils from his touch. After a brief, tense exchange, Lucy saddles a horse and rides away. Nancy, left alone and watching the house, feels immense despair. She is just a child with a flood of horrific memories, no family, and nowhere to go.

As part of her escape plan, Sally waits in the Robisons’ orchard, where Kima, who works for the Robison family, brings her a disguise and supplies. As Sally is changing, Nancy appears at the edge of the orchard, distraught. Sally recognizes her as the little girl she had found crying in the woods three years earlier. Risking discovery, Sally calls out to Nancy, who also recognizes her. Nancy experiences a mental health crisis, crying that she is all alone. Sally comforts her, insisting she is not. When Nancy mentions having a cousin who doesn’t remember her, Sally gives her a second small yucca horse she has kept for three years, telling her to give it to her cousin when she is ready to remember.

Lucy finds the U.S. Army camp outside Fillmore. Overcome with emotion, she manages to tell the commanding officer about the surviving children of the massacre. Having delivered just enough information for the Army to begin an investigation, she gallops away before they can ask her name. Unable to face returning home immediately, she stops her horse near the Paiute camp at Corn Creek and whispers an apology.

In a sermon, LDS Church President Brigham Young asserts the Mormons’ innocence in the massacre. He stresses that the only reason they have not been charged with any crime is that the U.S. government fears that the Mormons would be swiftly acquitted and they would have no one left to blame.

Peach finds Nancy at the orchard and gently leads her home. Nancy, overwhelmed by her reawakened trauma, is put to bed. She falls asleep and has a peaceful dream of a loving mother figure comforting her and Triphena. 

Nancy is awakened by the arrival of U.S. Army soldiers. Another wagon brings Triphena, who runs to Nancy. An officer shows Nancy two photographs: one of her family, and one of her paternal grandparents. The images trigger a clear memory. When Triphena sees the first photo, she points to Nancy’s father, who resembles her own, and says her first word: “Papa?” Nancy tells Triphena her own name is Nancy, which Triphena repeats.

After walking for three days, Sally reaches a ledge on Mount Timpanogus, the meeting point arranged by Inola. She reflects on their plan: Inola staged Sally’s death to provide cover for her escape, and Awan would volunteer to testify to the Army in Wyoming, with Inola giving him permission as his mother. Kanosh would try to stop him, but Elu and others would support Awan’s decision. 

After a tense wait, Awan appears, and they embrace, reunited. Their plan is for Awan to travel to the fort, send word that he arrived safely, and then report that he has fallen in love with a Bannock woman named Kahpeputz, with whom he shall remain.

Nancy refuses to say goodbye to her adoptive parents but has a tearful farewell with Peach and Violet. She, Triphena, and 15 other child survivors of the massacre are escorted by the Army back to Arkansas. 

During the journey, Nancy tells Triphena stories about their families to help them both remember, and Triphena begins to talk more. When they arrive in Bentonville, a crowd is waiting. Nancy spots her paternal grandparents, Eliza and William Huff, and beside them a couple she recognizes as her maternal grandparents, whose presence the Army had not mentioned. All four rush forward to embrace the two girls.