Julia's Heart is a pebble, shaped by the sea. Her toddler son found it on an Oregon beach and her husband had it engraved with their initials and hung on a chain. It is the one piece of jewelry she never took off, the most identifiable object found with her remains, and the thing to which her restless soul is tied.

Julia Lodge was a Black woman married to a white man and raising a small son in Portland, Oregon. Nothing in her fractured memories explains why she's dead nor how her body wound up in a cave above the ocean. When a teenager finds her body and the police arrive she learns that the year is 2018. She's been a missing person since August of 1986. The detective in charge of her case is a racist cop she has a personal history with and the prime suspect is her own beloved husband.