Wealthy heiress Jessica McCarthy desperately wants to be married and have a family. A rogue and a scoundrel, Zachary Belk is the only one who has proposed. Even though her father warns her that Zachary won’t make a good husband, she marries him. She soon discovers that her father was right. When the stock market crashes, and both families are left penniless, Zachary seeks a new fortune on a property he owns in another Manhattan, in Kansas. They are only there a short time before he deserts her. With a new baby, Jessica must learn to survive and support her family in an unfamiliar frontier land with only her faith and determination to guide her.

In 1906, I was barely over fourteen years old, and it was my wedding day. My older sister, Helen, came to my room, took me by the hand, and sat me down on the bed. She said, ‘You’ve always been a good girl, Maude, and done what I told you. Now, you’re going to be a married woman, and he will be the head of the house. When you go home tonight after your party, no matter what he wants to do to you, you have to let him do it. Do you understand?’ I didn’t understand, but I nodded my head anyway. It sounded strange to me, the way so many things did. I would do what she told me. I didn’t have a choice, any more than I had a choice in being born.

Emma is nine on the day they meet. Akecheta is twelve, and already the man of his house. He saves her life and tells her she belongs to him. As they grow up together on the frontier surrounding Manhattan, Kansas, he teaches her how to fish, hunt, and how to survive. She teaches him how to trust and how to share the burdens of his shameful past. When he graduates from high school, an aunt sends him to university in the other Manhattan, in New York. Emma continues her schooling at home. At first, Akecheta is dazzled by New YorkWhen a friend takes him to back-room poker games in the Bowery, he learns that Manhattan, New York, may be more deadly than the wilds of Kansas.

On Nancy’s 18th birthday, her father tells her she must marry her cousin Abner, the town’s blacksmith. He’s already married to three other women, one of them her younger sister. Nancy runs away and gets lost in the woods. Hungry and cold, she finds a seemingly deserted cabin and takes shelter. When she meets Jake, the man who owns it, she must decide if he is a man she can trust. Tired of living alone in the wilderness, he is willing to wait for Nancy to learn to care for him. She expects to spend her life there, but Abner has other ideas. Thinking they will only be safe in one place, Jake takes Nancy to his childhood home, Manhattan, Kansas.