Chapter 1
Amara sat quietly at the back of the class, doodling in her notebook while the others laughed and passed notes. No one noticed her, and honestly, she was used to it. Since her mother passed away last year, Amara had learned to shrink herself, to be silent and unnoticed. Her dad worked long hours, and her older brother barely spoke to her anymore.
At school, it wasn't much better. The other kids didn't bully her—but they didn't really see her either. She felt like a ghost drifting through the hallways, present but invisible. The only time she felt a little bit alive was when she opened her diary and poured her feelings out on paper. "No one sees me," she once wrote, "not even God."
That night, in the silence of her room, Amara whispered her first real prayer in months. "Jesus... do You see me?" It felt strange at first, talking out loud into the air. But a strange warmth settled in her chest, and though the room remained quiet, she felt less alone. For the first time in a long while, someone was listening.
The next morning, she looked at her diary and saw something new. Where her pen had stopped the night before, a new sentence was written in her heart: I see you, Amara. She couldn't explain it, but she smiled. Maybe—just maybe—Jesus was more than a name she heard on Sundays. Maybe He was close.
