She was twenty-one when she met him. It was early spring where bright daffodils bloomed in the graveyard soil and church bells chimed through a sky still tinged with winter. Isobel had been walking home from her part-time job at the bookstore, a place that smelled of musk and forgotten romance etched in the spines of old paperbacks. She wasn’t looking for anything. She never had. Wanting had always seemed like a dangerous pursuit.

The house with the apple tree was the first church I ever left. From the outside, it looked like every other home at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac. But behind the tidy curtains and pruned hedges was a family fractured down the middle — not in drama, but in slow erosion.

 Isobel Moretti learned too early how silence can shatter a life. A family divided, a quiet rebellion, a seed of rage buried deep in her chest. Forgiveness wasn’t an option and forgetting would be fatal...