For over a century, Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn has kept vigil over New York City; 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 post-Civil War Manhattan, a school principal keeps her community together, even as she loses her daughter. During the Great Depression, a young wife keeps a lie but finds her voice. As the pandemic claims the city, four seniors keep safe, trading golden-years vitality for solitude. But it is Green-Wood that keeps them all-along with its archivist, Rebecca. Among the forgotten histories she guards, Rebecca finds the key to her own origin story.

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