In Concord, Massachusetts, fifteen-year-old Bailey faces repeated arguments about his future. After Bailey’s grandmother suggests Bailey’s sister Caroline attend Radcliffe, Bailey’s father forbids it and Caroline quickly loses interest, focusing instead on wedding plans for their sister Millie. The grandmother then demands that Bailey go to Harvard and even offers to pay, but Bailey’s father insists Bailey will take over the family farm.

Bailey unexpectedly admits that he wants to go, not because he is certain about Harvard, but because it represents mystery and possibility compared to the farm’s predictable cycles. Bailey keeps pressing the issue, which turns lectures into shouted decrees and slammed doors; Bailey’s mother mostly avoids the conflict, siding with her husband while quietly hinting it should be Bailey’s choice.

On solo visits to Cambridge, Bailey’s grandmother tells Bailey she cares less about Harvard itself than about Bailey having opportunity. She reveals she allowed Bailey’s mother to marry Bailey’s father because trying to forbid it would not have stopped her, and she argues children should not have their choices dictated. Remembering Bailey’s imaginative childhood, she urges Bailey to follow his dreams despite his father’s authority and reminds him not to forget her words.

At home, Bailey’s father bluntly tells Bailey that Bailey’s opinion does not matter, and Bailey’s mother advises him to let the fight go. Bailey responds by spending more time outside: working far from his father, taking long walks through fields, woods, and cemeteries, and returning often to a familiar oak tree where he reads and thinks about escape from farm life.

Bailey makes the tree his refuge and moves a small wooden box of treasured objects into a hidden nook there. Among arrowheads, stones, feathers, and keepsakes, Bailey keeps yellowed pages where he wrote every detail he could remember about Le Cirque des Reaves and a single white glove that proves, to him, a red-haired girl he met at the circus was real. Bailey cannot bring himself to open the box anymore or throw it away, imagining instead that the tree might someday seal it inside.

On a grey Saturday morning, Bailey rushes through chores and climbs to his favorite spot in the oak with a book and an apple. When Bailey finally looks up, Bailey is stunned to see black-and-white striped circus tents standing in a nearby field, so shocking that Bailey nearly falls from the tree.