Silence of My Father

  Rhea Waye always thought the marriage to her childhood sweetheart would last forever but it didn’t work out that way and the loss threw her into a depression, though not the sort one would have expected. She found herself weeping for a father who had left her mother two months before Rhea was born.  And it’s this absence of a father that has now come back to haunt her, that empty part of her childhood. Her new therapist, Dr. Allison, said it best, “A new loss allows us to mourn all the others we miss, imagined or otherwise.”

  When Rhea was a little girl, her mother made up bedtime stories about the father’s adventures and also stories about Rhea and the father. So the puzzle of what was true and what was false left her with not just a mystery about a father who’d never showed himself but a sense that much of her childhood was a fiction.      

  Rhea meets Edward only a month or two after the separation from her husband and she becomes obsessed with him. He fits her father fantasies perfectly. But Edward isn’t her father. He is the worst sort of nightmare and Rhea is caught again in the middle ground between truth and fantasy. The truth is that she must ultimately save Edward’s nephew and her own son from this man.