After her husband’s funeral, my stepmother dragged me into the forest. “It’s a remote place,” she told her new lover. “Anything can happen.” She left me, a mute girl, to die in a swamp. She thought no one would ever know. But a year later, she was summoned to the child services office. She walked in smugly, but froze in horror. I was there, no longer mute, holding the hand of the city’s top child rights advocate who looked at my stepmother and said, “We need to talk.”

When Mary was very young, she loved fairy tales. At first, her mother read her books, but then she learned to read on her own. Every time, Mary believed that a real fairy tale would happen in her life. It turned out that dreams do come true, but her fairy tale turned out to be a terrible one.

First, her mother died. It was so unfair that it just didn’t make sense in Mary’s little head. What, no more mom? Everyone else has one, and she doesn’t. Mary couldn’t believe her mom wouldn’t enter the house again, wouldn’t make a delicious breakfast, and they wouldn’t roll around in bed together, playfully pillow fighting.