Prologue

    With dark brown eyes flying open with a start, Abbie lay in bed for a few seconds to catch her breath. She sat, clutching the sheets tightly to her chest, trying to make sense of the dream she’d just had for the third time that week. The one where she was calling out to her parents, chasing after them yet getting nowhere, but they just kept walking away from her without looking back. The thing was, they weren’t really her parents. Not the ones that she knew anyway.

    Abbie had been having this dream continuously, ever since she’d found her birth certificate two weeks prior. Her whole life that she knew had turned into one big lie, everything she thought that she knew really anything but. The word sounded weird, and felt foreign on her lips when she whispered in aloud.

    Adopted.

    For sixteen years, she’d thought that she knew her family. Belonged to them.  Now, she realized that she never really had. Abbie felt hurt, betrayed. Why hadn’t her ‘parent’s’ told her sooner? Had they ever planned on telling her?

    Staring out of the open blinds and up into the dark, clear sky, Abbie couldn’t help but wonder just where her birth parents were, and if they were close.  Were they alive, and what did they look like? Did she have other siblings, and they been given away as well?

    All of these questions plagued her mind, and Abbie knew that she couldn’t rest until she knew the truth, and found the answers that she was looking for.

    She just hoped that she didn’t hurt anybody along the way, but more importantly to her, that she didn’t get hurt herself.