Rosie's parents and younger brother are killed in a car accident, leaving her an orphan at sixteen.

The Calverts agree to take Rosie in as their ward and employ her as a live-in maid.

After a night of drinking, Truman seduces and then rapes Rosie while Celine is away for the weekend.

When Celine discovers Rosie is pregnant and suspects Truman is the father, she has Rosie committed to a psychiatric institution.

Rosie gives birth at the Sonoma institution to a daughter she names Amaryllis.

Rosie and Belle attempt to escape the institution with baby Amaryllis but Rosie faints and is recaptured.

Rosie wakes up after surgery to discover she has been forcibly sterilized without her knowledge or consent.

Rosie completes her time at the Sonoma institution and is transferred to a rehabilitation group home to reenter society.

Rosie finishes her rehabilitation period and is officially freed from all government oversight.

Rosie overhears a scientist at her hotel discussing synesthesia and later introduces herself to him as Anne.

Helen visits Celine at the vineyard and learns that Truman raped Rosie and arranged to have her committed.

After persistent searching, Helen learns that Rosie's daughter Amaryllis is at the Fairbrook Children's Home in Oakland.

Helen legally adopts Amaryllis from the orphanage, and the two begin building a life together.

Helen builds a career as a speaker and author, publicly exposing the spread of eugenics practices in America.

Helen recognizes Rosie at a book signing and reveals that Rosie's daughter Amaryllis is alive and nearby.

Rosie becomes an orphan after a car accident kills her family and is taken in by the Calverts as their maid, only to be raped by Truman Calvert and committed to a psychiatric institution when her pregnancy is discovered. At the institution, Rosie gives birth to a daughter she names Amaryllis, but a desperate escape attempt fails and she is forcibly sterilized without her consent. After years of rehabilitation under state oversight, Rosie is finally freed, finds work at a hotel, and discovers that her neurological condition has a name—choosing a new identity as Anne. Meanwhile, Helen Calvert returns to America, uncovers what her family did to Rosie, and launches a determined search for both the girl and her child. Helen eventually finds Amaryllis in an orphanage, adopts her, and builds a second career as an activist author fighting eugenics. Years later, she recognizes Rosie at a book signing and orchestrates a long-awaited reunion between mother and daughter.

The headline events of Rosie's unjust institutionalization and Helen's search for reunion.

Rosie is roughly handled, sedated, and admitted to the Sonoma psychiatric institution as a ward of the state.

Staff at the institution discard Rosie's prized amaryllis bulb, a Christmas gift Helen once sent her.

A fellow patient named Charlotte undergoes an unexplained surgery and then permanently vanishes from the ward.

Dr. Townsend conducts an electroencephalogram on Rosie after she admits that she genuinely experiences colors in her mind.

A new patient named Belle arrives at the institution and quickly befriends Rosie while sharing her own story.

Belle and Rosie learn that the salpingectomy operations being quietly performed on patients are actually sterilization surgeries.

Dr. Townsend begins administering small electrical shocks during therapy sessions in an attempt to erase Rosie's synesthesia.

Rosie arrives at the bank to claim Truman's promised lockbox money but learns it was emptied before his death.

Helen works as a nanny for the Maier family in Vienna and grows deeply attached to young disabled Brigitta.

A Nazi health inspector arrives at the Maier household to assess Brigitta's condition, filling Helen with dread.

Martine races to Brigitta's school to save her daughter but discovers the children have already been abducted.

Helen successfully smuggles a deaf boy named Wilhelm across the border into Switzerland to hide him from the Nazi regime.

Helen visits the Sonoma institution, confronts Dr. Townsend, and receives confirmation that Rosie was forcibly sterilized.

Dr. Townsend's son Stuart intercepts Helen and gives her the hotel address and the name of Rosie's daughter.

Helen sits down with Amaryllis and tells her the full truth about her mother Rosie and the injustices she suffered.

From the moment Rosie arrives at the Sonoma institution she is sedated, stripped of her belongings, and subjected to intrusive experiments targeting her synesthesia. As fellow patients disappear after unexplained surgeries and she befriends a new arrival named Belle, Rosie slowly uncovers the full horror of what the institution is doing to its female patients. At the same time, Helen is living in Vienna as a nanny, caring deeply for a disabled girl named Brigitta just as the Nazi regime begins targeting vulnerable children. The health inspector's visit, the abduction of Brigitta, and Helen's courageous act of smuggling a child to Switzerland reveal the brutality of the eugenics ideology she will later find echoed in California. Upon returning to America, Helen confronts the Sonoma institution directly, obtains the crucial information she needs, and ultimately sits down with Amaryllis to reveal the truth about the mother she never knew.

The secondary struggles and discoveries that shaped Rosie's ordeal and Helen's mission.

As Rosie is taken away, she recalls her mother's dying wish that she always be careful and find happiness.

Celine gets drunk one evening and confides to Rosie that she always longed for a daughter she would have named Francie.

Wilson tells Rosie he clearly remembers her describing as a child that she could see colors connected to sounds.

Rosie confides her synesthesia to Truman and makes him swear he will never reveal the secret to Celine.

Rosie moves from desperately wishing to miscarry to embracing her unborn child as something precious and entirely hers.

Rosie cradles newborn Amaryllis in the hospital ward and silently vows that she will one day come back for her.

After giving birth, Rosie overhears Dr. Townsend and a nurse making plans to sterilize her.

Truman offers Rosie the key to a hidden bank lockbox with four thousand dollars in exchange for her silence.

Belle manipulates an orderly named Rudy into surrendering keys, and the two women finalize their escape plan.

Rosie confronts the institution matron about the forced sterilization and declares that all of them will have to live with what they did.

Helen stays with the Petrakis family and is stunned to discover that eugenics sterilizations are also occurring in California.

Johannes accepts his commanding officer's vicious insult about Brigitta without any protest, deeply alarming Helen.

Schoolteacher Emilie Pichler reveals to Helen that the Nazi regime is deliberately killing disabled children in the name of mercy.

Johannes confesses to Helen that he personally requested the fatal injection that ended Brigitta's life to spare her from experiments.

Amaryllis comes to Helen's hotel lobby and embraces her biological mother for the very first time.

Rosie's story is shaped by a chain of private turning points—from her mother's deathbed wish, to Truman's betrayal of her trust after she confides her synesthesia, to her transformation from fearing her pregnancy to fiercely cherishing it. The birth of Amaryllis is both a moment of profound tenderness and the trigger for the sterilization Rosie had dreaded, and her defiant final words to the institution staff mark a crucial moment of self-reclamation. Helen's story is driven by a parallel series of devastating revelations: the Nazi regime's murderous program targeting children, the schoolteacher's whispered truth, and Johannes's eventual confession about his own role in Brigitta's death. Back in America, Helen's shock at discovering that California practices its own form of eugenics hardens her resolve into lifelong activism. Together, these turning points illuminate how ordinary people make choices that either perpetuate or resist the cruelest forms of injustice, and the novel closes with the reunion its most consequential decisions made possible.

The pivotal decisions and revelations that changed everything for Rosie and Helen.