Prologue

She remembered this house in her dreams. It was large with three stories and a spacious backyard that her father had built a tall wooden swing set in. She remembered spending hours in that backyard with her older sister Kara and they would spend hours in the November leaves, creating ever bigger piles of fallen leaves and jumping into them before tossing handfuls of them in each other's faces and down each other's shirts.

She remembered how their mother would call them in for hot chocolate and the two of them would sit in front of the big brick fireplace and drink their hot chocolate while playing Clue or Candy land while their parents watched the news just a few feet away.

But when she was six, her mom got really sick. She didn't notice it at first but, looking back now, the signs were there. Mom would get up later and later in the day and she would get tired a lot faster, hardly able to keep with them as they enjoyed their summer days and weekends. It wasn't until that fall that things started to get bad.

First, her dad would come home earlier every day and then he just started working from home. Not only did mom look tired now but dad did too. After a while, mom couldn't even get out of bed anymore. Kara said it was because she had cancer but Grayson didn't know what that meant. Daddy just said that mommy was really sick and that soon the angels were going to take her to live in heaven with God. Grayson didn't know what that meant either.

It was a week before her seventh birthday when mommy didn't wake up anymore. A few days later, she remembered standing in a big room with lots of flowers and people who were crying and a big brown box that her mommy was sleeping in. She wanted to go up to the box and lay beside her mommy but there wasn't enough room and mommy looked funny.

She remembered going to a big field with lots of stones pointing towards the sky and a big hole that mommy's box was lowered into. She remembered looking up at the clear blue sky, not a cloud in sight as the man dressed all in black with a little leather book in his hands recited a bunch of big words that she didn't understand.

She remembered people crying and hugging her and then everything was a blur. One minute they're happy in their big house and the next, she and her sister are sitting in the backseat of the car watching as the house becomes smaller and smaller before disappearing all together.

And now, ten years later, sixteen years old and two parental deaths later, Grayson Becker stands just a few feet away from the front steps of her old house in Beacon Hills. The place where her mother was dead and buried. The place where her older sister ran back to as soon as she turned 18 leaving a twelve year old Grayson to deal with a still grieving father who lost himself in a bottom of a whiskey bottle every night after work.

The place where all her happy memories should lay but all she can see in those long ago dreams are the days when she was still young and innocent. The place where she didn't have to grow up to fast. The place where they were happy. She held nothing but for contempt for this place. Could her day really get any worse?