Chicago, 1937. The Great Depression has tightened its grip on the city, and three women find themselves bound together by the Elizabeth Sullivan Home for Destitute and Degenerate Women — a crumbling Victorian mansion that promises refuge while quietly trading in secrets.

Marian Walters, a disgraced nurse, arrives at the Home hoping for a fresh start. Instead she finds herself drawn into the life of Opal Olson—a mentally challenged young woman who turns up at the Home unable to explain her circumstances, carrying only a worn quilt and a small bag of paper fortunes. As Marian attempts to unravel the mystery of Opal’s past, a crisis forces her to choose between following the rules and following her conscience.

Across the city in a Drexel Boulevard mansion, wealthy socialite Evelyn Porter is suffocating beneath her mother’s expectations and her own private grief. After a stay at a discreet country sanitarium fails to mend what is broken inside her, Evelyn returns home convinced that one thing alone can save her — and she is about to learn that what she wants most in the world may come at a price she never anticipated.

Told in three interwoven voices, Paper Fortunes is a story about three women whose fates become tangled in a way none of them could have predicted—and the fragile, paper-thin line between the futures we are given and the futures that can still be rewritten.