Stanford, California

In the main timeline of the novel in which Gifty is 28, she is working toward her PhD at Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California. She works at a research lab on campus and lives in an apartment nearby (she mentions that Raymond called her apartment "The Witness Protection Pad" (246) because she had made no effort to decorate or otherwise make the apartment a comfortable living space). She recalls feeling a sense of awe when she arrived on the West Coast after living in Massachusetts while attending Harvard: "When I'd first arrived in California, everything had looked so beautiful to me. Even the grass, yellowed, scorched from the sun and the seemingly endless drought, had looked otherworldly" (7). At the end of the novel, while driving around town looking for her mother, Gifty observes neighborhoods of vastly different socioeconomic circumstances: "I found myself in neighborhoods with houses...