Anna and Mike had come such a long way since fleeing from the incestuous town of Tangent Springs.
Their lives had fallen apart in what was almost the end for both of them on that first evening in the barn. Unlike Lena, they had survived and escaped the intergenerational decay of the sick and twisted beliefs and behaviours of the sick and twisted men. Fathers, Uncles, brothers alike. They had escaped and found a life worth living. They had created love and trust and a family unlike anything Anna could have imagined in her short years before her escape. Back in those days when she would look out the kitchen window at the clouds, or into the suds of the sink where her lesser hands belonged, where she imagined a fairy tale ending that somehow always warped back into her nightmare of reality.
Even after escape had brought them to Uncle Frank and Aunty Margaret’s farm, that nightmare was not over. When life had seemed to have found the young lovers in a place of happiness with two beautiful children and a future that seemed to be too good to be true, it turned out that it was just that. All too good to be true.
Anna and Mike were survivors, but when one survives there must always be a price to that survival and of course the price would be far greater than anyone was prepared for. Survive they did, but had the price of their survival truly been paid?
