The Summer We Got Free

Ava Delaney was once a spirited child and a gifted artist. Years after a violent event shattered her family’s standing in their community, she lives with the consequences inside the same shadowed house. The Delaneys’ long conflict with their church has left them isolated without giving them a clean escape from the people who rejected them. An unexpected female visitor begins to disturb that uneasy stillness. Her arrival awakens memories, desire and parts of Ava that seemed lost, drawing the family’s buried history toward the surface. This novel follows the dangerous and necessary work of reclaiming a self shaped by silence, asking what freedom might mean when the past still occupies every room.