Preface
When something breaks, when it shatters, sharp edges are always left behind and that’s how it was with me. I saw myself as a broken window, fraught with shards sharp enough to make the hardest of hearts bleed. I cut people, not because I meant to, but because I was broken.
It had been that way for as long as I could remember. Only slivers existed. I was not whole, but something broken into pieces. There were pieces that whispered and pieces that shouted. Pieces that sought solace and pieces that screamed bloody murder. There were pieces that ached, and pieces that longed, and pieces that drifted on the breeze, quiet and gentle like ghosts in the dark.
Some had tried to repair me. They wanted to round out my razor-sharp edges, but it never really worked. I was angry. I was hurt. I was a person without hope. I lived in the dark, surrounded by invisible walls too high to climb.
As a mother I always saw myself as a failure. I never could figure out how things went so wrong. All I could do was live with the outcome, the fallout of my failures.
On the day it happened I hadn’t seen it coming. I had no idea that what started out as a simple conversation would end the way it did, with a secret so dangerous it threatened to destroy us all.
