The Long Road Home (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781449767785)

Nicole awoke to her own screams, shrieking at the very top of her lungs. Her voice was distant to her, as though she was in a cave. Her throat burned with each wail, from days of the same. The dream awakened her at the same time every morning. She lay in a puddle of sweat, the perspiration and tears soaking her eyelashes. Her heart beat without any rhythm, just hurriedly. It was like someone striking a key of a typewriter over and over as quickly as possible until the chime would ring, announcing the margin had been reached. Her whole body ached as though it had been running a race that it was not conditioned for. It would only be a moment before her aunt would burst through the doors to make sure she was okay. She began taking deep breaths to calm herself and wiped her face furiously. She looked around the strange room that was to become her own and felt like a flower that had sprung up in a desert. She was wilting in a foreign land, dying in a place where she was not supposed to be, where she could not breathe.