Set in 1982, Molly is a teenage girl living in Michigan with her widowed mother Jean, and younger brother, Michael. When Jean marries Dave, a writer and widower, the new family moves to an isolated rural synagogue, converted into a house, outside the small town of Detroit. On the way, they stop at a psychiatric hospital to pick up Dave’s preadolescence daughter, Heather, who has lived there for three years, suffering the trauma of seeing her mother die in a house fire.