When two uniformed women drag eight-year-old Jeanette into a bathroom, she screams for her mother, who looks down and walks away. After she gets a rough shower and a uniform of her own, Jeannette starts a new life as a ward of the state, locked behind bars at the Arthur J. Audy Home, Chicago's notorious detention center. On that day her family life ceases. At sixteen she leaves foster care to live on her own. At nineteen she is a single mother with a two-week-old daughter and nine dollars to her name. Jeanette longs to change the trajectory of her life. But how can she offer her daughter more than she was given? How can she create the family she was denied? Throughout her challenges, a question lingers: Was I taken from my family or did they give me away? It took sixty years to uncover the truth.