When Marta is seventeen, her father publishes his first editorial condemning the General, the man who rules their Latin American country and his former friend. Immediately, her classmates and the nuns who teach her begin to avoid her. Ricardo, her younger brother, suffers similar ostracism. Even their own family, her parents' siblings, alienates them without shame. Their father's paper is shut down. When it begins operating underground amid curfews and the like, he begins running a dissident circle out of their home. The General's looming cult of personality proves powerful and his dissidents are arrested. Conditions in school are hardly better; Marta finds herself bullied into doing homework for the high-ranking military men's daughters. Enduring abuse at school and, worse, seeing Ricardo suffer from worse issues makes Marta question their father's choice to stand up to the General and wonder about their father's duty to their family. People begin "disappearing," and the newspaper nearly evaporates. The nuns allow Marta to graduate early, and her family readies to flee across the border, but they are too late — the military arrests them, forces them to pack, and places them under house arrest far away. For sixteen months, they languish in their father's prison.