Ellie's father dies and she and her mother move from their large home to a smaller house in downtown Tehran.

Ellie meets the bright and rambunctious Homa Roozbeh on her first day at a new school.

Homa convinces Ellie to skip school and visit the Grand Bazaar, where they eat ice cream and discuss their futures.

Ellie's mother discovers the truancy and decides to marry Uncle Massoud so she and Ellie can move away from the neighborhood.

Ellie says goodbye to Homa's family, receiving a bird-charm necklace from Homa and giving her a pressed-flower notebook in return.

Homa re-enrolls in Ellie's elite high school years later and wins over Ellie and her new friends.

Mehrdad proposes marriage to Ellie at a chelo kabab lunch and they agree to wed after graduation.

At Sousan's party, Ellie lies down in the colonel's study and tells him that Homa organized a major student protest.

Ellie watches two men in black suits drag Homa into a car outside the university and drive away.

Ellie visits Homa after her prison release, discovering she has married Abdol and has a baby daughter named Bahar, and is asked to leave.

Mehrdad is offered a research position in New York City and Ellie reluctantly leaves Iran with him.

Homa sends an urgent letter to Ellie asking her to take in Bahar so the girl can escape Iran.

Ellie and Mehrdad meet Bahar at the airport and bring her home to their New York City apartment.

Ellie confesses her role in Homa's arrest, and Homa reveals she refused to give Ellie's name to her prison interrogators.

At Leily's birthday party in Miss Ellie's café, the family watches a video and spots elderly Homa still protesting in Iran.

After her father's death, young Ellie moves to a new neighborhood and forms a transformative friendship with the bold and idealistic Homa. Their childhood bond is severed when Ellie's mother arranges a remarriage and moves them away. Years later the two women reunite in school, fall back into closeness, and build full lives — until a single careless conversation at a party sets off a catastrophic chain of events. Ellie's unintentional betrayal sends Homa to prison, and the guilt she carries shapes every decision she makes for the next two decades. When political upheaval and war threaten to consume Iran, the friendship is quietly revived through the sacrifice of sending Homa's daughter Bahar to safety in New York. Only when a long-hidden truth is finally spoken aloud do Ellie and Homa achieve the reconciliation that allows both women to move forward.

The headline events that define Ellie and Homa's intertwined lives.

Ellie visits Homa's house for the first time and is overwhelmed with jealousy for Homa's warm, loving family.

Ellie learns to cook alongside Homa's mother, marveling at the transformation of an onion into something magical.

Ellie returns home early after winning first place at the school ceremony and discovers her mother in bed with Uncle Massoud.

Ellie meets Mehrdad for the first time at the river during the Sizdah Bedar picnic and is immediately drawn to him.

Homa tells Ellie over lunch at Café Andre that her father was imprisoned after a coup ousted the prime minister.

Ellie and Homa hike the Alborz Mountains together and a stranger takes a Polaroid photograph of the two friends.

Ellie and Homa find Mehrdad and his friend Abdol at the teahouse after the mountain hike and share a meal.

Ellie and Homa argue the week before Sousan's party when Ellie refuses to support the protest Homa is organizing.

Ellie and Mehrdad hold a traditional Persian wedding ceremony, but Ellie quietly notices that both Sousan and Homa are absent.

Ellie suffers three miscarriages and she and Mehrdad eventually come to accept that they will not have children.

Homa earns her teaching certificate and stands nervously before her first classroom of students.

Abdol travels to a cousin's wedding and is killed when fire engulfs the Cinema Rex in Abadan.

Ellie's mother visits New York and at Bloomingdale's reveals the truth about Ellie's father's unfaithfulness and her own sacrifices.

Bahar arrives overdressed at a party, unknowingly drinks too much alcohol, passes out, and is rushed to the hospital.

Homa gives Ellie the pink notebook now filled with her mother's recipes and suggests Ellie open her own restaurant.

Ellie's hunger for family and belonging is cemented the first time she enters Homa's warm, food-filled home, and the contrast with her own cold household shapes her jealousy throughout her life. Several secondary discoveries deepen the stakes — Homa's father is in prison for his politics, and Ellie's own family has a troubling secret she stumbles upon. As the girls grow into young women their friendship continues to be tested by politics, romance, and class, and even their mountain hike and teahouse meeting carry seeds of future conflict. Ellie's married years bring private grief in the form of lost pregnancies, while Homa rebuilds her life step by step through teaching, love, and terrible loss. When Abdol is killed and war arrives, Homa's world is stripped down to her daughter's survival, setting up the sacrifice that will reunite the two women. In New York, the final phase of their story plays out through Bahar's crisis and a gift that contains decades of love and memory.

The significant scenes and discoveries that fill out the story's full arc.

At the Grand Bazaar, Homa declares she wants to become a judge and a shir zan who will change Iran's laws for women.

Ellie speaks back to her mother for the first time ever after her mother calls Homa's family peasants and vermin.

When Homa appears in Ellie's elite high school classroom, Ellie initially ignores her, embarrassed by the difference in their social worlds.

Outraged that Afarin is translating Homa's communist pamphlets, Ellie demands that Homa hand them to her instead.

Homa and Ellie leap together over the festival fire, and for a brief moment, Ellie feels the world is entirely theirs.

Sousan meets Ellie in the park and reveals that the colonel is a SAVAK spy, confirming Ellie's worst fear about causing Homa's arrest.

In prison, Homa refuses to answer any of her interrogators' questions and is raped by one of them as punishment.

Ellie spots Homa and Bahar looking healthy and well in the Grand Bazaar and blurts out that Homa can contact her in America.

During long solitary walks after her release, Homa makes a fierce private decision not to let her attacker take away her spirit.

The shah leaves Iran and Ayatollah Khomeini returns from exile, and the new Islamic Republic begins stripping women of their rights.

At a women's rights march, a man raises a club to strike Bahar and Homa grabs him and fights back with her fists.

As bombs fall on Tehran, Homa resolves to send Bahar to safety and asks Ellie's mother for Ellie's address in America.

Bahar tells Ellie that Homa spoke of her warmly for years and only kept her distance to shield Ellie from suspicion.

Bahar wakes from her coma and Homa announces she will obtain a visa and return to America to watch her daughter grow up.

Homa's letter in the epilogue reveals she was re-imprisoned on her return to Iran and had her passport confiscated for decades.

From childhood, Homa's fierce declaration of her ambitions marks the first divergence between the two girls and sets the course of their very different lives. A sequence of small but consequential choices — Ellie defending Homa to her mother, then later embarrassingly denying her — reveal the push and pull of loyalty and insecurity that defines their bond. Ellie's impulsive decision to translate Homa's pamphlets draws her dangerously close to the political world she has always avoided, while a moment of pure shared joy at the fire festival creates the last image of uncomplicated hope before everything breaks. The confirmation that Ellie's careless words caused Homa's arrest, followed by the revelation of what Homa endured in silence to protect her, forms the emotional axis of the entire novel. The revolution's arrival strips away possibilities for Iranian women one by one, pushing Homa toward her most desperate act of maternal sacrifice. The final revelations — Bahar's secret knowledge, Homa's forgiveness, and the epilogue's disclosure of yet another imprisonment — reframe everything that came before and leave Homa standing as the novel's ultimate lioness.

The key decisions, discoveries, and emotional shifts that redirect both women's destinies.