When her brother dies suddenly and she’s named legal guardian to three children she’s never met, Lita Bravo, a tattooed, thirty-two-year-old amateur mixed martial arts fighter, leaves her high desert home in Arizona for the Bay Area in California to pick up a future she never wanted.

For Jade McGovern, a serious twelve-year-old who color-coordinates her clothes and can’t stand disorder, life becomes unhinged when her parents die. Thrust into a new home life with a rude, incompetent aunt, Jade decides to do everything she can to get back to California.

Evie Long, whose life, loves and libations have always come first, really wants a drink and can’t figure out why the tattooed woman is bossing her around. Progressing into dementia, she doesn’t recognize the daughter who left nearly twenty years ago and wonders why her son and husband aren’t coming to take her home.

Life together in Arizona is challenging for all of them, and when Lita needs to visit her father in Mexico, she has no option but to take the kids and her mother with her. Returning to Mexico triggers Evie’s memories in unexpected ways, and while Lita and Evie find that the past is impossible to escape no matter how far they run or hide, Jade has to decide how far she will go to control her future.

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