Didn't realize my mother was a person until I was thirteen years old and she pulled me out of bed, put me in the back of her car, and we left home and my dad with no explanations. I thought that Ma was all that she was and all she had ever wanted to be. I was wrong. As we made our way from Virginia to California, returning to the places where shed lived as a kid in foster care and as a teenager on the run, repaying debts and keeping promises, I learned who she was in her life-before-me and the secrets she had kept even from herself. But when life on the road began to feel normal I couldn't forget the home wed left behind, couldn't deny that, just like my mother, I too had unfinished business. Ma pulls Alex out of bed and onto a pilgrimage of self-discovery through her own past. As they make their way from Virginia to California, returning to the places where shed lived as a kid in foster care and as a teenager on the run, repaying debts and keeping promises, Alex begins to realize that the journey's destination is perhaps Ma's biggest secret of all.