Paper Fortunes (paperback)

Chicago, 1937. The Great Depression has tightened its grip on the city, and three women find themselves bound together by the Elizabeth Sullivan Home for Destitute and Degenerate Women — a crumbling Victorian mansion that promises refuge while quietly trading in secrets. 

Marian Walters, a disgraced nurse, arrives at the Home hoping for a fresh start. Instead she finds herself drawn into the life of Opal Olson—a mentally challenged young woman who turns up at the Home unable to explain her circumstances, carrying only a worn quilt and a small bag of paper fortunes. As Marian attempts to unravel the mystery of Opal's past, a crisis forces her to choose between following the rules and following her conscience. 

Across the city in a Drexel Boulevard mansion, wealthy socialite Evelyn Porter is suffocating beneath her mother's expectations and her own private grief. After a stay at a discreet country sanitarium fails to mend what is broken inside her, Evelyn returns home convinced that one thing alone can save her — and she is about to learn that what she wants most in the world may come at a price she never anticipated. 

Told in three interwoven voices, Paper Fortunes is a story about three women whose fates become tangled in a way none of them could have predicted—and the fragile, paper-thin line between the futures we are given and the futures that can still be rewritten.