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…

for her.

“So I hit him,” she whispered, a tear finally cutting a clean track down her dirty face. “I hit him with the book, and I grabbed Theo, and I ran into the trees. I thought he was going to eat us.”

She had carried thirty pounds of dead weight through dense, unforgiving woods, losing her shoes in a muddy creek bed, hiding behind a rotting oak log,continue reading …