Alone in the park near their house early one morning, a five-year-old girl pushes her little sister on a swing, as she often does when they go to the park by themselves. It’s a cool, crisp morning and the only sound aside from the youngest girl’s laughter is of the old swing chain creaking with each new push. The heavy fog sits just above the ground and casts an eerie shadow throughout the park. The older girl wishes that for once her mother would have let her go to the park alone to enjoy the quiet morning by herself instead of always having to drag her little sister along with her.
As they laugh and play together on the slide, they don’t notice that the man watching them from the edge of the forest on the far side of the park has moved closer. When they slip down the slide for the last time and delight in the feeling of their bare toes in the cold sand, they look up to see him standing right in front of them.
The man looks sweaty and nervous, and as his lips curl into a smile when he learns that they are there without their parents, the older girl immediately remembers that she’s seen him in the park before, many times, always watching them.
A moment later he’s gone and he’s taken one of the girls with him.
Joy’s fondest childhood memories are of sitting on her gramma’s lap learning to drum, to speak Mohawk, and to be a storyteller. When she lost her gramma and her connection to her Mohawks roots when she was eight, Joy used her stories to keep her gramma close to her heart. Years later, with a husband and triplets, Joy slowly gives up pieces of herself to take care of her family, including becoming her husband’s full-time caregiver as a mysterious illness overtakes his body. Shortly after his death, her daughters move away for school, and Joy finds herself with no one to take care of for the first time in almost two decades.
Lost and alone, Joy turns to television and social media to mask her pain. Following an intervention by her daughters, Joy slowly embarks on a journey of self-discovery to heal her heart and find her true self again.
To stay off the bullies’ radar, fifteen-year-old Melody pretends to be just like her angry and troubled classmates at Depressed High. But, Melody is hiding a big secret – with a perfectly happy family, and a motivational speaker for a mother, she has grown up hearing wonderful, happy tidbits her entire life and is a happy girl with big goals and ambitions. The only person who knows her secret is her best friend, Kaylee. When Kaylee’s troubled life takes a downward turn, she turns on Melody, shares her secret with the school bullies, and joins them in making Melody’s life a nightmare. Melody has a feeling that Kaylee is in trouble so she must find a way to deal with the bullies and save Kaylee before it’s too late.