Documentary filmmaker Eloise Grossom has just finished Lost Children, an eighteen-month investigation into child-trafficking routes across Latin America, when an anonymous VHS tape reaches her in a motel room in Mexico.
It is dated November 11, 2007. On it, a starved young woman in a hospital gown stares into the camera and whispers, “She is lying.” An off-screen voice answers: “You know what to do, Lemon Pie.” Hidden inside the case is a note:
Cairnloch is the Highland town where Eloise grew up, and the one place she swore she would never go back to. Adopted, and estranged for fifteen years from the wealthy, controlling family who raised her there, she can recite the dates of her life like a phone number. She just can't remember living most of them.
With her network slashing budgets and her crew calling the tape a hoax, Eloise and her producer, Lucy, pay for the trip themselves. They hire Raymond Campbell, a former detective with a guarded smile and an accent that keeps slipping, to help them get to the bottom of it. The night before they are due to meet Esther, a brick crashes through Eloise's motel window with a single word: LEAVE. Esther never shows. Instead, a bartender slides a black notebook across the bar to Eloise and disappears.
The notebook is Esther's diary, written in 2007 inside the Jenkins Psychiatric Unit, a private clinic where patients' memories were altered in the name of curing their trauma. There, Mrs. Jenkins promised that the worst thing that ever happened to you could simply cease to have happened. Page by page, the diary records Esther's life inside those walls: the people she came to know there and, above all, what was being done to them.
As Eloise keeps digging, she learns that the clinic burned on November 11, 2007, the same date written on the tape. Officially, it was an electrical fault. Officially, its founder, Dr. Jenkins, died in the flames that same night. But with Ray at her side, the official story begins to fall apart. The clinic left no staff records. The only two outsiders at its final night were dead or missing within a week. And on the list of donors who paid for that building is a name Eloise knows far too well.
Someone sent her that tape. Someone else wants her gone. And the closer she gets to the truth, the less she can trust the one witness she has always relied on: her own mind.