If you’ve been with me since VIER, welcome back. If you’re new here, welcome—I’m glad you found your way in.

Renate’s story has lived inside me for decades. Writing her is my way of giving voice to the ones who never had one. I think all of us have been Renate at some point: unheard, unseen, accused, misunderstood. This book is my affirmation to her, and to you. It’s my way of saying, I see you. I hear you. I feel you. I love you.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for turning these pages with me. Wherever you are, whoever you are, I hope this story meets you gently and stays with you in all the places where you’ve ever felt small. You are not alone. You never were.

– Chandra Martin

Texas

July 2026

www.authorchandramartin.me

The sanctuary leaned before Reverend Whitlock asked it to.

That was his gift. Not truth. Not discernment. The ability to make a room bend toward him before he had said anything worth bending toward.

He dabbed his forehead with a white handkerchief. Adjusted the microphone. Lowered his voice until it dropped below the register of ordinary speech - into the register that meant something is coming.

“Turn with me this mornin’ to the Gospel of Luke, chapter ten, verse nineteen.”

Pages rustled. Bodies shifted. The room gathered itself.

“’Behold, I give unto you power...’”

He let the word sit.

“Power.“

✺

Read more

Renate watched her own body from the ceiling.

She didn’t remember leaving it.

One moment there had been screaming, tears, hands reaching toward her. The next, there was only distance - the same familiar distance that had saved her before, arriving now with the practiced ease of something that knew exactly when it was needed.

Below her, the kitchen moved like water disturbed by a stone.

Darius rushed. Voices overlapped. Someone cried. Someone argued. She heard everything, and nothing reached her completely. The sounds drifted upward softened, wrapped in the strange stillness that held her the way the land held everything - without asking, without releasing.

For the first time in months, nothing hurt.

Her body lay where it had fallen, one arm folded beneath it, her cheek pressed against the cool linoleum. From above, she looked smaller than she felt. She looked like something that had been set down.

✺

Read more

After Rochelle returned, Saturdays belonged to sound. Soul Train played on the television every weekend. American Bandstand filled the gaps when word spread that Black artists would appear. The stereo ran from morning until evening. V103 never drifted far from the radio dial.

The house sounded different now.

Henry Sr.’s gospel humming no longer filled every room. Neither did Renate’s own quiet chant –

“You get a line, I get a pole... honeeeey...”

which she sang softly to herself as she moved through the house, the way children repeat things they love without knowing yet that love and protection are different impulses entirely.

Music changed the atmosphere.

It did not change the people.

✺

Read more

Renate doesn’t remember when Rochelle returned to the Moreau house.

In memory, she simply appeared one day - already unpacked, already settled, already occupying the guest room as though she had always belonged there. The way certain people occupy space: completely, without apology, without the courtesy of an entrance.

Memory worked that way with certain people. They arrived without entrances. They disappeared without exits.

Only the feeling remained.

✺

Read more

During the last summer Renate would ever spend at the Moreau house in Wisteria Grove, she prayed for terrible things.

She didn’t know words like justice or retribution. She knew nothing of ancestral reckonings or the weight history sometimes carries forward. She only knew that fear had made a permanent home inside her body, and she wanted someone—something—larger than herself to make the boys feel it too.

Her prayers were clumsy. Childish. Desperate.

She prayed that whatever listened in the dark would answer.

By then, Henry Sr.’s work schedule had changed. Nights belonged to home again. He slept beside Evelyn, and Renate was moved into one of the twin beds in the room with Trey. Silas and Darius shared the other bedroom across the hall.

The arrangement changed nothing. It merely rearranged the danger.

Every night Trey insisted she sleep flat on her back.

If he woke for water or the bathroom and found her turned onto her side—even slightly—he pinched her until she cried out. He never explained why. He simply behaved as though her sleeping body belonged to him.

One night, long after the house had settled into silence, Renate lay awake staring at the ceiling.

Outside, cicadas droned beneath the summer heat. Inside, the darkness felt unusually full.

She prayed again. Not politely. Not faithfully.

She prayed through clenched teeth and wet cheeks. She prayed toward the ceiling. Toward the floorboards. Toward the trees. Toward the land. Toward whatever might still be listening.

Then she became perfectly still. That was when she heard them. Not one voice. Many. Layered together until they sounded almost like wind moving through pine branches.

We see you.

We hear you.

Be still.

It sees.

The room fell silent again. Renate didn’t scream. She didn’t move. She lay awake wondering about those last two words.

It sees.

She did not know what it was. Only that something had answered.

✺

Read more

When Renate thinks back on those summers, she doesn’t remember seasons. She remembers colors.

Blue. Yellow. Red.

Memory arrives that way now - not as stories, but as flashes. Impressions. Each color carries its own weight, its own temperature, its own private language.

Blue came first.

Not the bright blue of summer skies. The bruised blue that settled quietly beneath skin. The color of longing. Of waiting for someone to notice. Of believing that if she hurt badly enough, visibly enough, surely an adult would finally see it.

No one did.

Yellow never left.

It buzzed beneath everything. It woke before she did. It tightened her stomach each morning before her feet touched the floor. It waited in the hallway. It lingered beside the smokehouse. It followed the sound of bicycle tires cutting across the yard.

Yellow was anticipation. The kind that has forgotten what hope feels like.

Then there was red.

Not all at once. Red arrived one small injury at a time - patient, accumulating, the way pressure builds inside something sealed too long.

✺

Read more

As an adult, Renate has resisted arranging those memories into something cleaner than they were.

Memory prefers stories. Trauma keeps fragments.

The smell of Pine-Sol on freshly mopped floors. Fireflies gathering at dusk. The sweetness of a peach too ripe to hold its shape. The sting of red clay against bare legs. The television humming steadily to a room where no one was really listening.

She remembers learning that families carry love and harm beneath the same roof without contradiction - that the same hands that make biscuits and wash backs and search for baby aspirin can also fail, in ways that leave no visible mark, to see what stands directly before them.

She remembers learning that children sometimes inherit pain before they inherit language. That silence can become so ordinary it begins to sound like peace. That a child who stops crying is not always a child who has healed.

Sometimes she is a child who has simply learned that no one is coming.

✺

Read more

Looking back, she remembers the aftermath more vividly than the moments that caused it — the quiet, repetitive tasks that became their own kind of language.

The summers continued.

The injuries blurred together. Some lived in her body long before they found language. Some never found language at all.

Read more

Then there was the night she has never been able to explain.

She had gone to bed sick, coughing beneath the summer heat, curled beside her grandmother as she always did. Sometime before dawn, she woke.

The coughing remained. The darkness remained. Her grandmother was gone.

The room felt strangely hollow - as though someone had drawn the air out through a door she couldn’t see. A stillness that paid attention. The kind she had felt before, in hallways, in corners, in the quality of light certain rooms held when she entered them alone.

She never felt herself leave the bed. Only that her awareness drifted somewhere beyond it - across a threshold she could sense but not locate.

Then came voices.

Soft. Urgent.

Not frightening. Not comforting. Simply certain, the way old things are certain.

Be quiet.

If they hear you, they will come.

She remembers nodding. She remembers trying not to cough. She remembers believing them completely - not because she understood who spoke, but because something in her body already knew the voice. Had always known it. The way you know a sound you have never consciously heard but recognize the moment it reaches you.

When morning came, sunlight poured through the curtains exactly as it always had. Her grandmother moved through the house, preparing for the day. The kitchen smelled of breakfast. Everything appeared unchanged.

Only Renate carried the memory.

She carried it the way she carried everything that summer - silently, carefully, pressed close against the inside of her chest where no one else could reach it.

What shifted would never shift back.

It lingered in the air, in her body, in the way afternoon light settled differently across the yard. Time no longer moved in neat succession. It softened at the edges, one summer bleeding into the next until memory stopped measuring years and began measuring weight.

Not days. Not dates.

Heat.

Heat rising from red clay. Heat trapped beneath pine branches. Heat pressing against window screens while the box fan pushed warm air from one room to another without mercy.

Even now, when she thinks of the Moreau house, she remembers temperature before she remembers chronology. The body keeps its own calendar.

✺

Read more

CW: This chapter contains references to childhood physical and sexual abuse. Please read with care.

Renate had no language for what happened that day. She only knew that something in the world shifted. The air thickened. The house tightened. And a line she had never seen was suddenly behind her.

That morning began like so many others.

Evelyn had already slipped into the dawn before the rest of the house opened its eyes. Henry Sr. was still on his shift and wouldn’t return until late afternoon. The house held only the four of them - three boys and one girl who had not yet learned what that combination meant.

For the first time since arriving at the Moreau house, Renate stood alone with the boys.

At nine years old, that fact felt like nothing. By evening, it would feel like everything.

✺

Read more

Looking back, Renate thought of the summers of 1980 and 1981 as one long, unbroken season. The days folded into one another until she could no longer separate them.

She couldn’t always locate which year held a particular afternoon, or whether one hurt had come before another. The days drifted together beneath the same relentless heat — stitched by routine, silence, and a growing unease that settled somewhere she couldn’t quite reach.

Memory rarely keeps what happened. It keeps what remained.

Sometimes she wondered if the land had taught her that. Everything there repeated itself. Morning. Evening. Sunday. Again.

After emancipation, Gideon Ainsley had given three hundred acres to the people he once owned, land that became the Ainsley Community.

✺

Read more

The house sat on an acre of land, though Renate had no sense of what an acre meant at nine years old. She only knew the world had widened around her in a way that felt sudden and disorienting — as though space itself had stretched while she wasn’t looking. And somehow, in the same breath, the house had become too small.

The driveway ran mostly dirt, interrupted by a single strip of cracked pavement her Uncle Henry’s prison work crew had laid years before. Whenever a car pulled in, red clay rose in soft clouds and drifted over everything — her bare legs, the lawn furniture, the laundry line, the collard patch bending under its weight. Sometimes the dust lingered long after the car stopped, hanging in the air as though the land were holding its breath, as though it preferred disturbance to stillness.

Years later, she would remember the dust before she remembered faces — the way it rose, the way it settled, the way it seemed to watch.

✺

Read more

It was late June, or maybe early July — the kind of Southern heat that arrived before the sun had fully committed itself to the sky. The air in Wisteria Grove pressed against the skin like a second body. Renate woke with her nightgown damp, the room breathing around her, the humidity so thick it felt deliberate, as if the house itself had exhaled onto her.

She was nine. Her first summer away from home.

Long before Renate was born, the land beneath the Moreau house had belonged to Gideon Ainsley, the wealthiest landowner in Flasch County.

She didn’t know when the arrangement had been made. She couldn’t remember being asked. No memory of a conversation, a goodbye, or a suitcase packed by her own hands. Only the fact of it: one day she had been somewhere else. Now she was here.

Years later, she would wonder if that missing memory mattered — if something had reached into the past and smoothed it over, the way scar tissue fills a wound so completely you almost forget there was one. At the time, she accepted it the way children accept most things adults decide for them: quietly, without a word.

✺

The house felt awake.

Before opening her eyes, she already knew she was alone in the bedroom. At the same time, she felt the peculiar certainty that she was not alone in the house.

Fear had shape. Fear had reason. This was something older — a stillness that paid attention, as though something had noticed her waking and decided, for now, to wait.

The feeling thinned when she sat up, but it didn’t leave.

The old house breathed around her. Wood expanded in the heat. Floorboards settled. Pipes clicked somewhere deep inside the walls. Ordinary sounds. Every old house made them.

Still, Renate listened — not for danger, but for confirmation of whatever had been watching.

Down the hallway drifted the smell of breakfast — Sunday smells, church smells. Sausage and biscuits. Cheese melting into eggs. Collards already simmering for dinner, as if her grandmother had been awake since before the dark lifted.

When Renate stepped into the hallway, the air shifted — not the full “occupied” weight from before, but a faint tightening, like a held breath.

A rustle reached her, sourceless. The framed photographs held still on the wall. The lace curtains hung without motion.

Renate’s eyes moved to the space just behind her shoulder.

Years later, she would remember that moment more clearly than she remembered breakfast.

✺

In the kitchen, her cousins — Darius, Silas, and Trey — were already seated at the counter, eating with the ease of boys who had always belonged there. Perhaps they had. Renate paused in the doorway, letting the room settle around her before she stepped inside.

Her grandmother Evelyn’s breakfast covered every surface. Biscuits rested beneath a dish towel. Patty sausage crackled on a paper‑towel‑lined plate. Collard greens simmered low on the stove, their smell older than the morning, older than the house itself — a scent that felt like memory more than food.

Renate fixed a plate and carried it to the table.

She remembers eating. The scrape of forks against ceramic. The steady hum of the box fan. Her cousins talking — though memory preserved only the feeling of the conversation, not the words, the way a dream leaves behind a mood long after the images dissolve.

Outside, cicadas droned in the heat. Inside, a floorboard creaked somewhere deeper in the house.

Slow. Deliberate.

Renate looked toward the hallway before she could stop herself. Nothing was there. Nothing ever was.

Yet she carried the feeling all morning — the quiet certainty that someone had just stepped out of sight. That whatever moved through this house moved with intention. That it had always known her name.

✺

The rest of the morning passed in fragments. Washing up. Pulling on church clothes. Climbing into her grandfather’s Buick Electra 225 — she couldn’t remember the year, only the size of it, the heavy doors, the smell of vinyl warming beneath a sky with no mercy.

At church they sat in the second pew on the right. Her grandfather, Henry Moreau — church deacon, keeper of quiet authority — led the hymns. His voice carried the way certain voices do, as though the sound rose from somewhere beneath the chest, from something settled and old.

The congregation followed. Their voices rose behind her grandfather’s, not in harmony but in a kind of collective strain — a sound pulled upward, word by word, as if the room itself demanded it. The hymns dragged through the air, heavy and aching, each syllable stretched thin with a pleading she didn’t understand. It didn’t sound like praise. It sounded like crying out — slow, dragging, every word drawn long as though the singers were trying to reach heaven by force. There was a heaviness in it, almost fear, a sense that if they didn’t sing the hymn exactly this way, with this weight and this ache, God might smite the entire congregation where they stood. The sound pressed against Renate’s chest, trembling through the room like a warning rather than worship, a shield the adults held steady to keep something terrible from breaking loose.

The church ladies fanned themselves with cardboard fans — Jesus smiling on one side, a funeral home advertisement on the other. The movement caught Renate’s eye. With each slow rise and fall, Jesus flashed into view and then vanished, replaced by the funeral home’s promise of arrangements and rest. Holiness and death trading places in the same breath. The rhythm of the fans matched the dragging hymns, an uneasy pulse that made her think of the hallway that morning — of something watching, waiting, listening. The adults seemed unbothered by the proximity of salvation and burial, as if carrying both in the same hand was simply how the world worked. But to Renate, the flicker felt like a warning, a sign she wasn’t old enough to read.

A teenage boy played piano near the choir stand. Thirteen, maybe fourteen, his fingers moving with the ease of someone who had learned the music before he learned language. When he sang — “Anybody here love the Lord…” — the congregation erupted, voices rising from every corner of the sanctuary.

Renate sat inside all of it, watching.

The feeling from the hallway found her again — the sensation that something invisible had entered the room, or perhaps had been present the entire time, patient and unhurried, waiting for the right voices to call it forward. The fans kept moving, Jesus and the funeral home trading places in the air, holiness and death flickering like a signal she didn’t yet understand.

She thought: this is what a house feels like when it is full.

She didn’t know yet that she would spend years learning the difference between a space that was simply occupied and a space that was alive.

✺

Sleepiness found her. She rested her head in her grandmother’s lap. The church sounds blurred together — piano, voices, the slow pulse of cardboard fans, her grandmother’s hand moving in a steady circle against her shoulder. It was a rhythm that asked nothing of her, a small shelter inside the larger, trembling room. A rhythm that said: you are here, you are held, and for this moment, that is enough.

Looking back, Renate would mark that moment as the beginning — the quiet hinge on which the summer turned. The beginning of whatever happened between her and her cousins, the beginning of the things she would spend years trying to explain to people who had never lived in houses like the Moreau house, in towns like Wisteria Grove, where the line between the living and everything else was thin enough to talk about.

She remembers the benediction. Her grandparents talking beneath the shade trees. She doesn’t remember the ride home.

Memory closes there — a door easing shut on a summer afternoon, leaving behind only the heat, the heaviness, and the certainty that something on the Moreau land had recognized her the moment she arrived.

That it had been waiting.

That it was glad.

Book One: THOSE SUMMER DAYS

Welcome | Copyright | Dedication | Epigraph | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Afterword

“All that you touch you change.

All that you change changes you.”

— Octavia E. Butler

Your belief in me made this possible.

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The author has made every effort to ensure the accuracy of details within the context of the stories; however, no representations or warranties are made regarding the completeness or suitability of the content. Neither the author nor the publisher shall be liable for any damages arising from the use or interpretation of this work.

Before the chapters unfold, meet a few of the people who live inside Wisteria Grove. Others move around its edges - familiar with the land, touched by it, or quietly shaped by the weight of its history. The grove reaches farther than its borders. These are not full histories or finished arcs - just the way you might notice someone in passing. A glance. A gesture. A feeling.

These figures move through the early light of this world. You will learn them slowly, the same way Renate does.

Renate Vale

She learned early that lies felt safer than honesty - because the truth never felt secure in her hands. She wears those lies like thin veils, masking insecurities she cannot name out loud. She places no trust in adults to do the right thing, or to arrive when needed. Experience taught her to move on her own. Loneliness clings to her, quiet and familiar, and her self-esteem sits low enough to be overlooked by anyone who isn’t paying close attention.

She sees everything. She learned to observe before she learned to speak up - how to read a room, read between the lines, and understand the things people work hard to hide. Renate moves through Wisteria Grove with a softness that looks like silence. It is survival.

Read more