Extraits

Chapter One

The cemetery gate yawned before Jennifer like some mystical doorway to another world. The dead dwelled beyond this point, and the living weren’t welcome. The thought made her shiver, and she suddenly wished she could turn back. She didn’t want to push open the wrought-iron gate, didn’t want to walk through the moss-encrusted stone archway. Didn’t want to confront what was waiting for her on the other side.

“You sure you’re up for this?” Rachel asked.

Definitely not, Jennifer thought even as she nodded at her best friend.

Although she would have preferred to be anywhere else in the world, Jennifer pushed open the gate. Her father lay buried in this neglected patch of land nestled on the outskirts of the city. She hadn’t seen or heard from her father in years and had only recently learned of his passing. Now she was about to visit his grave. In her wildest dreams, she had never pictured their reunion to play out like this.

Her memories of the man felt hazy. One day, when she was nine years old, he hadn’t returned from work. According to her mother, his vanishing act was a godsend. It had never felt like that to Jennifer. His sudden departure had left a gaping void in her life, an emotional hole that she’d desperately tried to fill all throughout her teens. Alcohol, drugs, and bad boyfriends had all failed to extinguish her deep sense of abandonment.

Jennifer’s self-destructive tendencies had nearly driven her mom to the brink. “If you knew your father the way I did, you would thank your blessed stars that he left us,” she often said.

Her mother’s words had only made Jennifer even more determined to find him one day. According to her mom, her father had been a strange man with even stranger interests, whatever that meant. There were rumors, of course, whispered stories exchanged at family gatherings. Tales that her father had formed a cult of some kind and had cut himself off from society. To her young mind, these had sounded like wild fantasies, and she refused to give them much weight.

When she met Rachel, a yoga-obsessed health nut who saw the best in everyone, Jennifer finally decided to turn her life around. She dumped the bad boyfriends, turned her back on the long nights of hard partying, and began to get her act together.

Almost overnight, her life improved drastically. She managed to graduate on time and was even considering pursuing a master’s degree in counseling. She wanted to help young kids who were as confused as she had once been at their age, to steer them through the rough seas of adolescence. Her future looked bright—until she received word of her dad’s death, and all the progress she’d made felt like it had vanished overnight.