In the tired and sleepy town of Tilly, North Carolina, fourteen-year-old Claire Plyler has met her edge. In the years since the Great Depression first hit, her tally of losses has grown to encompass her father who left to find work never to return, her mother, embittered by grit and grief, and her showboat brother James who vanished one night in search of a life worthy of being written. One morning when a strange and suspicious boy appears to her at sunrise on her favorite hill, Claire risks trusting him if only to break her cycle of standing still.Meanwhile, Eli Dolen has never stopped moving, nor can he afford to. A petty thief and novice time-traveler, Eli wakes up in 2010 Charleston, South Carolina, twelve years before his home time, with little means of reaching his intended destination. Stranded, Eli’s desperation mounts with each second he spends trying to recover his loved ones, scattered across time by his mistake. As Eli and Claire’s threads of loss and longing grow increasingly tangled, their stories become inextricable, begging the question if any of us is ever really alone.