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To my daughter, Annabelle. It took fourteen years for your love of reading to bloom, but now that it has

there is nothing I enjoy more than seeing you lost in a book. This one is for you. There is a lot of you in

Willa. I love you.

—Mom

I Needed to Escape My Reality

CHAPTER 1

WILLA

“Hasn’t changed much since you left. Go ahead and unpack. Settle in. I got more work to do up at the

house. We’ll go in the morning and get you registered for school,” Nonna said as the pinched frown on her

face that had been there since she picked me up at the bus station an hour ago, only grew more intense.

“Don’t go nowhere. You hear me? Stay put until I get back.”

I managed a nod. I hadn’t been able to say more than “thanks” to her since I’d seen her. The last time

I’d seen my nonna was two years ago when she’d saved up enough money to come visit us in Little Rock.

She was a large part of my life. There had been times in my childhood that when I thought no one else

loved me, I knew she did. Nonna never let me down.

Seeing the obvious disappointment in her gaze now was hard to swallow. But I hadn’t expected

anything different. It was a look I had gotten used to. I saw it in everyone’s eyes these days when they

looked at me.

No one believed me. Not my mother, certainly not my stepfather, or the police officer who’d arrested

me. Not even my brother. No one. Which meant my nonna wasn’t going to believe me either. Sure she’d

agreed to take me in when my mother packed my bags and left them for me on the front porch the day I

was released from the correctional center I’d spent the last six months in. I had nowhere to go, and calling

my mother’s mother was the only thing I knew to do. I’d lived with Nonna until the summer I turned

eleven. Her home was the only real home I’d ever known.

My mother had finally decided she could take care of me, the child she’d had at fifteen and left with

her mother the day she graduated from high school three years later. When my brother, Chance, had been

eight, his father had finally married my mother. She wanted to bring me into the family. Problem was, I

never really fit. My younger brother was adored by his father, and I seemed to always be in the way. I

kept to myself until I turned fifteen and everything started to change.

“Answer me, Willa,” Nonna demanded, snapping me out of my thoughts.

“Yes, ma’am,” I replied quickly. I didn’t want to upset her. She was all I had left.

Nonna’s expression softened; then she nodded. “Good. I’ll be back soon as my work at the big house is

done,” she added, then turned and walked away, leaving me in the bedroom that had been mine for the

first eleven years of my life. I had been happy here. I had felt wanted here.

But I’d messed that up, too. I was good at messing up. If there was a wrong decision to be made, I

managed to make it. I intended to put that in the past. I wanted to get back the girl I had been once. The girl

whose grandmother was proud of her. The girl who didn’t act out for attention. The attention I had gotten

from my mother hadn’t been the kind of attention I wanted. In the end I’d lost her. She wanted nothing to