All Stella wants is to escape her abusive and controlling husband, Robert, the department head at a local Oregon university. So when the opportunity arises, Stella takes her teenage twins, Loreen and Gabriel, and breaks free. They move in with her long-lost sister Katrina and Katrina’s husband Marcus, a long-haul trucker, in the small, beachside town of Monarch Bay, California.

What happens to Stella and the people she loves most is a drama filled with surprises of unexpected love and compassion, longed-for family loyalty, and unforeseen caring.

Stella finds a job working for David, a recent widower and owner of Patti’s Pastries, and she volunteers to be a surrogate for Kat and Marcus. The twins adjust well to their new home, although Loreen’s biker boyfriend, Harley, gives Stella reasons to worry for her daughter’s future.

Just as Stella, David, and the twins find footing in Monarch Bay, Robert shatters their newfound peace and threatens them all. Will Stella ever escape the monster who has brutalized her for years? Will they all survive to enjoy the life they richly deserve?

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Chapter One

Stella stood in her kitchen, hands balled up at her sides, staring out the window
above the sink, happy she wasn’t seeing her reflection staring back at her, knowing
what she looked like today. She bent her head and rubbed her temples with her
fingertips. Her temples. One of the few places that didn’t hurt when she touched the
skin. When she saw herself in the bathroom mirror that morning, the truth hit her
in the gut, almost as hard as Robert’s fist last night. The awful reality glared at her
in a spectacularly colorful display of proof: a swollen left eye, rimmed in a light-
purple bruise, blood caked under her nostrils, left cheek puffy and discolored.
Reminded her of when she had the mumps as a kid. She noticed a ringing in her left
ear that was not tinnitus. Perhaps a busted ear drum? She didn’t know. Might never
know, since she wasn’t allowed to visit the doctor’s office.

Robert said Corvallis, a town of 58,000 people in central western Oregon, was too
small, everyone knew everyone else’s business. Plus he always insisted she’d be fine.
Give it a couple of days, and she could resume her normal duties—cleaning house,
going to the local super market, watering the front lawn, preparing meals—all tasks
Robert expected an obedient wife to perform in exchange for the good life she and
the twins were privileged to live. Thanks to Robert’s position as head of the Spanish
Department at Oregon State University.

After washing her face with cool water and applying gobs of make-up, Stella looked
reasonably okay, as long as no one came too close. The waves of her long, dark hair
hid the sides of her face and neck. So there was that. She hobbled downstairs and
limped to the kitchen table, left leg hitching at every step. Pain shot from her knee to
her thigh and she gently lowered herself onto the chair. The burner phone she’d

bought lay next to the bowl of fruit in the center of the table, and she reached for it
with her left arm. Ouch! Her left arm only stretched out half-way before another
zinger flew from her wrist to her elbow. She gently laid that arm on the table and
grasped the phone with her right hand.

She’d memorized the number the private investigator found yesterday when she
called him from the only phone booth still in existence in this town. Everyone
nowadays owned a cell phone, but why get rid of a functioning telephone? Thank
goodness someone in the city government was old-fashioned enough to stick with a
good thing. Robert checked all her incoming and outgoing calls each night after
work. She couldn’t take the chance he’d see a number he didn’t recognize.

He’d think Stella was having an affair with Phillip Milton. Which she wasn’t and
never would, of course. She’d honored her marriage vows for eighteen years. She
wasn’t about to take any chances at this point anyway. Not when she finally saw a
teensy glimmer of hope on the horizon. If the phone number Phillip Milton gave her
was correct, all she had to do was punch it in and hope to God her sister Katrina
answered. Stella’s options for changing her and her seventeen year old twins’ lives
hung in the balance. What if Katrina answered but didn’t want to talk to Stella?
Stella had not spoken to Kat in ten years. Robert wouldn’t allow it. But Katrina
didn’t know that.

“What is wrong with me?” she whispered to no one. But she knew the answer. This
was her last hope, and she was so sick and tired of disappointment being her
constant companion. Just one more ounce of it and she knew she’d just give up.
Give up and succumb to her fate. Live the remainder of her days with a man who
wouldn’t let her go. Continue to be married to an abusive bastard for another
eighteen years. She was forty years old —that would make her fifty-eight then! Holy
tomoly! The only way she’d ever leave Corvallis would be in a coffin. Even then,

Robert would bury her in the Corvallis cemetery, so she’d never be able to escape
this place.

“Please answer, Katrina.” Tears dribbled down Stella’s cheeks. She swiped them
with her functioning right hand. “Suck it up, Stella.”

She straightened her sore back, shook her head like a wet dog, pressed the eleven
numbers, then listened to the ringing.