While rushing home, I caught my tiny children abandoned in the woods, injured and unrecognizable. I burst into my parents’ house yelling, “What did you do?!” My sister coldly replied, “You lost your rights.” Before I could react, my dad choked me out. Then, my phone rang with a call from the ICU…

Chapter 1: The Shattered Sanctuary

The moment my tires crunched onto the familiar asphalt of my driveway, a primal alarm tripped somewhere deep in my cerebellum. It was Tuesday, a little past five in the afternoon, and the sky over town hung low and coppery, thick with a suffocating summer humidity that made the horizon shimmer. I had just survived continue reading …