Sarah grows up with her Romani father and grandfather after the passing of her non-Romani mother. For years, her father, Dominic, and grandfather have travelled for work, leaving at all times of the night and staying away for days at the time. Sarah has no idea what the business is, only that there is a large leather bag which she is forbidden from touching or knowing about because of the mochadi, or dirtiness, within it. Shortly after she turns 14, her father takes her with him on a work call for the first time. She loads up with him in the van and travels to the house of a woman named Rosalia. She and her father go upstairs into the room of a sick man. Dominic tells Sarah to leave the room, and she waits oustside for many hours. When he leaves the room, he is exhausted and tells Rosalia to go upstairs immediately. They take the money and leave. On the way home, they hit a deer. Sarah demands that her father help the deer, insisting that she knows what her father did at the house. He admits that he can take away pain, and shows her how the operation works on the deer, sucking out a black liquid through a tube and leaving the wounded deer to die in peace. When they arrive back home, Sarah's grandfather is about to die and she wants them to take away his pain, but he explains that the ones who take away the pain cannot take away their own. The pain is inside of them and consumes them slowly. Her grandfather dies, and after a few more years, her father falls ill as well, finally sucumbing to the pain he has taken in over all these years. Sarah gives him pain medication one last time and sits by his bed as he dies, performing the same rituals she was never taught but watched her father do for her grandfather when he died. She leaves a note on the counter asking for her father to be cremated and walks out of the house with the leather bag of tools her father used and the keys to the van, prepared to leave the house behind and begin a new life on her own.