Tess, a botanical artist with a troubled past, meets Eric, a handsome park ranger, on a field-trip to outback Australia. It is a short and passionate romance and Tess returns to Melbourne to finish her degree in fine arts, but her life turns upside-down when she discovers she is pregnant. Too scared to tell Eric the truth and enduring the criticism of her house-mates, Tess faces a difficult birth in a heartless city hospital alone, an experience which brings back memories of her traumatic childhood. With only her special stone, Maliki, for comfort, Tess manages to secure a job restoring mannequins and finds a home with the elderly couple, Anna and Max before settling into the life of a working mother. Some years later, she meets the charismatic Oliver on a work trip, a man whose good looks, charm and easy confidence are deceptively appealing. When her intuition leads to her refusing his advances, she cuts the work contract short and heads back home. On her return, however, Tess discovers that something terrible has happened and finding herself and Lily homeless once again, she reluctantly accepts Oliver’s invitation to move in with him. It is a plan that goes quickly downhill, as during this time, Oliver’s sinister side is revealed and when his abusive behaviour leads to Lily being placed with her sister Kim in Mildura, Tess is determined to escape and retrieve her child. Kim, too is thrown into a journey beyond her expectations as she tries to connect with a child she was not expecting, and forced to face a closet full of skeletons. As Tess and Kim become entwined in a web which was spun by their family well before their time, they find themselves racing the clock against evil forces beyond their control.