The world has taken much from Virginia "Gurl" Foster in her twenty-five years of life. Her own birth took her mother. The Dust Bowl and Great Depression took her family's farm of hundred-acres, and with it, the yellow house on the hill with stained-glass windows, the finest Black-owned property in their corner of Missouri. Not long before that, her father. Though the Great War hadn't killed her brother Junior, it did take his voice, broke his spirit, and caused him to roam the land like a dust storm.

But despite all this, Gurl found herself grateful for what she has. A job working in the cotton fields her father used to own, living in a cabin on what used to be her father's lands. But she has Albert, her beautiful five-year old boy, and Claude, a steady husband. Despite what she's lost, she knows what she has and holds it close: She holds her head high, but she also holds a shameful secret close to her heart. She's joyful every day the dust clouds don't settle on the land, for every rain cloud, for friends and family. For home. She ignores the pull of the wider world, and the dreams she has to quiet for the sake of peace.

But everything Gurl has gained and lost will all change during the fateful events of one week in the height of the Missouri summer, the week of the county fair. A week that begins with her brother coming down the lane, after so many years had passed, to find the proud Foster farm is now in the hands of a White family, the Cunninghams. When Gurl is approached by the wrong man, someone whose love is impossible for her to consider, much less ache for, she will have to decide what - and who - she's willing to risk, and how far she is willing to go to. By the end of that week, things will never be the same.