"Joy works the graveyard shift at a grocery store outside Boston and nurses an addiction to cough syrup. Then a sickness that begins with memory loss and ends with death sweeps the country, and for the first time in her life, Joy has an advantage: she is immune. This gains her admittance to a hospital in rural Kansas and a chance to escape her bleak existence. As winter descends, the hospital's fragile order breaks down and Joy breaks free, embarking on a journey to Florida to find her birth mother, the woman who abandoned her as a child."--Back cover.
