People come from everywhere to forget. At the Memory House, in Tumble Tree, Texas, Lucy's father can literally erase folks' heartache and tragic memories. Lucy can't wait to learn the family trade and help alleviate others' pain, and now, at sixteen, she finally can. But everything is not as it seems.

When Lucy practices memory-taking on her dad, his memory won't come loose, and in the bit that Lucy sees, there's a flash of Mama on the day she died, tinged red with guilt. Then Lucy wakes up the next morning with a bruised knee, a pocketful of desert sand, and no memory of what happened. She has no choice but to listen to Marco Warman--a local boy she's always wondered about, who seems to know more than he should.

As Lucy and Marco realize there are gaps in their own memories, they team up to fill in the missing pieces--to figure out what's really going on in their town, and to uncover their own stolen history along the way. But as the mysteries pile up one thing becomes certain: There are some secrets people will do anything to keep.