Gas-2-Light - The Pattern: The Pattern: Escaping death was the easy part. Surviving her family was the real battle. (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780956761118)

She thought it was someone else's story. Honour killings happened to other girls.

They were stories on the news. Other people's tragedies.

Even when training began before her teens, she never imagined it would become the story of her own family.

She believed that blood is thicker than water. She still believed there was love there; it simply needed to be reached.

How do you earn the love of a family that tried to kill you?

That's not a metaphor. For Inaya, it's the question that shaped decades of her life.

She didn't know she was asking it.

She only knew she kept trying.

She grew up in a system that called control 'protection', called silence 'loyalty', and where the men alone decided the futures of the women around them. The people who were supposed to keep her safe were the very people she needed to survive.

But surviving wasn't the end of her story.

She didn't just endure what happened.

She tried to earn her way out of it.

Believing that if she could become good enough... useful enough... patient enough... invisible enough... the family she loved might one day give her permission to live the life she wanted.

How do you train a child to spend decades trying to earn what should have been given freely?

Gas-2-Light: The Pattern is the story of that conditioning.

How a girl is trained, slowly and systematically, to believe that love can be earned, that loyalty is measured by sacrifice, and that if she simply tries harder, her dreams and her family's demands can somehow be reconciled.

It is also a story of how trauma rarely announces itself. How can a young woman simultaneously understand she is being destroyed and still reach toward the people destroying her?

If you've ever stayed longer than you should...

Tried harder than you should...

Believed that loving someone enough would eventually make them love you back...

You may discover that Inaya's story answers questions you've been asking yourself for years.

Book One of the Gas-2-Light Trilogy.