When Alexandra attempts to end an abusive marriage, her husband Tareq abducts their infant daughters from their Montreal home and deposits them with his family in a primitive village in Jordan. Trying to retrieve them through legal means, Alexandra comes face to face with Arab cultures where children belong to the father's family and women have no rights to them. She puts a promising career as a medical researcher on hold, sets off alone to Jordan and succeeds in an audacious plan to smuggle her daughters back home. But upon returning to Canada, she finds a judicial system that is unable to protect her children from being kidnapped again — this time for good, forcing her back to a life with the abusive husband. For the next twenty years, while achieving a PhD and working as a respected scientist, she submits to her husband's tyranny for the sake of her daughters. Her coping mechanism is to dissociate herself from constant verbal and emotional abuse and live as an observant stranger trapped in a life.