Excerpt

Excerpt from The Girl In The Window

(Author Note: This is the Prologue)

Sarah sat in her 1999 Chevy Blazer, parked beneath a gray Kentucky sky, the engine silent. Rain slicked the windshield in steady rhythm—soft, insistent, and cleansing. The steady tap of each drop felt almost like breath against glass, like the world itself was exhaling after holding something in too long.

Across the cemetery lawn, a small procession gathered beneath umbrellas the color of coal. They moved like shadows in the downpour, blurred and slow, like the grief they carried had weight. A black casket dipped slowly into the earth, swallowed by mud and memory. Some wept. Others stared ahead blankly, lost in their own thoughts.

Sarah felt none of it.

No tears. No anger. No sadness.

Only stillness.

Only peace—profound and overdue.

She didn’t join the mourners. She hadn’t come to be seen. She remained parked at the edge of the cemetery, watching through the rain-smeared glass from a distance. It was how she had lived for years—on the periphery, behind invisible walls, always observing, always assessing, always surviving.

Steve was being buried today.

And she had come—not to say goodbye, not to forgive, not to mourn—but to see. To witness the end. To know, with her own eyes, that it was real. That the nightmare had a coffin now.

The man who had terrorized her childhood, haunted her adolescence, and cast his long, ugly shadow into the first years of her adulthood was gone. Dead. And the world somehow felt wider without him in it.

For years, she’d lived like prey—checking door locks twice, keeping her back to the wall, memorizing exits. She’d taught herself how to disappear in plain sight, how to measure her voice, how to carry herself like she didn’t exist. That kind of vigilance gets into your bones. But now… now there was no one left to run from.

She rested her hands in her lap, tracing the seam of her jeans with the edge of her thumbnail. Rain tapped against the hood. The wipers squeaked softly every few seconds, wiping away a view that never really changed.

She was free.

Not long before the funeral, she had received a call from Angie—one of the few family members whose voice she could still stand to hear. Steve was in hospice. Unresponsive. Yellow with liver failure. Shrunken by years of rage and rot. Angie hadn’t asked much—just thought Sarah might want to know.

She hadn’t gone for him. She hadn’t gone for them. She’d gone for herself.

Walking into that hospital was like stepping into the past with no flashlight. The walls smelled of antiseptic and slow death. Her feet felt heavy with every step down the hallway. Bobby met her near the door, older now, softer. His voice was quiet when he told her Steve wouldn’t wake, couldn’t speak, couldn’t hurt her. Still, her body had screamed to turn back.

But she went in anyway.

The room was crowded with ghosts—distant cousins, weathered aunts, siblings she hadn’t spoken to in years. They looked at her like nothing had ever happened. Like she was still the same girl who used to braid hair and wash dishes and keep secrets with bruised lips.

And there he was.

Steve.

The man who had stolen her childhood like a thief in the night. The man who had made her afraid to breathe too loudly, to laugh too freely, to exist in her own body. He lay motionless beneath thin hospital sheets, jaundiced, hollow-eyed, a fraction of the monster he had once been.

He looked like all the other times she’d seen him passed out—slumped in a chair or sprawled on the couch, stinking of liquor and venom. But now, there was no threat. Only a dying shell of a man who had once thrived on control.

She lasted four minutes. Maybe five.

Then the breath caught in her throat, and she fled the room.

Out in the hallway, she collapsed onto a bench, her chest shaking, her palms covering her face as the tears came—not of grief, but release. The kind of weeping that wrings something loose. That washes out rot. Bobby sat beside her, his hand on her back, saying nothing. There were no words. Only the sound of her body letting go of years.

A few days later, the call came. He was gone.

And now, she sat watching his casket disappear beneath the wet dirt, the final trace of him vanishing into the ground. There were no thunderclaps. No shrieking wind. Just the sound of rain and the low murmur of goodbye.

She thought of the girl she used to be—the one who stared out the window waiting for her mother, trying to believe that love might still come home. The one who tiptoed through silence, who kept secrets like splinters under her skin. The one who tried to make herself invisible to survive.

Now she was a woman. A mother. A survivor.

And again, she sat at a window—only this time with the storm outside and peace within.

The man was dead.

The story, at long last, was hers.

And for the girl in the window—for the child who once clung to hope in the dark—

That was enough.

That was everything.

But peace never comes without a cost. And hers began a long time ago, in a house where nobody was watching.