At Green-Wood Cemetery, the living and the dead share the same ground. For over a century, this Brooklyn sanctuary has sheltered both—the famous and forgotten buried beneath its rolling hills, and generations of neighbors walking its winding paths. The cemetery remembers what the city wants to forget.

In these linked stories spanning from the nineteenth century to today, ten women navigate impossible choices in New York City. In post-Civil War Manhattan, a school principal keeps her community together while losing connection with her daughter. During the Great Depression, a young wife keeps a lie in order to find work, and through it, her own voice. As the pandemic claims the city, four seniors keep themselves safe, trading their golden-years vitality for solitary survival. But it is Green-Wood that keeps them all—along with its archivist, Rebecca. When Rebecca discovers that her own origin story lies hidden among the countless histories she guards, remembering the forgotten becomes the work of understanding herself. 

What Keeps Us excavates erasure and reinvention in the buried lives of ten New York women.