Prologue: The Ghosts of Yesterday
I was ten when my mother decided I was a burden. In her eyes, I didn’t fit the picture of the “perfect family” she longed to create. With her new husband and a son she deemed worthy of her love, I was cast aside like an unwanted relic of her past. My only refuge was my grandmother—Grandma Brooke—whose warm arms and endless kindness embraced me when no one else would. In her home, I found the love and acceptance that my mother had so callously denied me.
Yet, even as I grew up under Grandma’s gentle care, the sting of abandonment never fully faded. I carried it like a secret weight in my heart—a burden that would haunt me into adulthood. And then, one day, when I was thirty-two, fate forced me to confront a truth I’d long tried to forget.
