Book excerpt: In the small town of Atlas, Alabama, four people collide emotionally and physically; one dies a sudden and brutal death. Michelle has been living in her own hell because she believed too easily, too quickly, in the words of the man of her dreams, Johnny Blauser. Her first year of college life led her into love and, carelessly, pregnancy, only to be abandoned by a man she had believed loved her like she loved him. Too steeped in religion to consider abortion, her solution was adoption, and to fool her mother with an elaborate lie about where she was and what she was doing while she waited for her baby to be born. With the best intentions, she delivered her baby into the hands of an evil father who eventually smothered the infant. She took an apartment in the same complex as the couple that had adopted her child, to somehow watch over her baby, whom she could not, after all, save.