It’s February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. While the town’s men embrace the coming prosperity, its women intimately know and fear the violence that always seems to follow.

When a fourteen-year-old girl shows up at Mary Rose Whitehead’s door, bleeding and desperate for shelter, she has to make a choice. To choose to aim her rifle at the man pursuing Gloria Ramirez. To choose to acknowledge that the town she calls home is small-minded and brutal and built for those who have the money to control it. To choose to see the damage men do and hold her nerve.

When justice is as slippery as oil, and kindness becomes a hazardous act, sometimes the courage to choose is all we have to keep us alive.