I was at the beach with my grandkids when a strange message appeared on my phone: “Leave quietly. Don’t tell them anything.” My hands started shaking, but I did exactly what it said. Minutes later, I realized what I’d just escaped from — and who had sent the message.

My name is Carol Whitman. I am sixty-seven years old, a widow, and until last summer, I thought I had weathered every kind of heartbreak life could possibly deliver. I had buried a son, then a husband. I had learned to live with the quiet echoes in a house once filled with laughter. But nothing, absolutely nothing, prepared me for the message that materialized on my phone that sun-drenched afternoon at Clearwater Beach.