The Leaving

When Trixie was sixteen, she learned how much could be lost without anything actually happening.Years later, she is a mother herself-older, steadier, and still paying attention. When her marriage begins to unravel, Trixie finds herself facing the moment she has feared since girlhood: the moment when a child realizes the world is no longer secure.Determined not to let history repeat itself, Trixie navigates early motherhood, betrayal, and the quiet devastation of abandonment with a vigilance born of experience. As the past presses in-through memory, inheritance, and the echoes of her own upbringing-she must decide what it means not just to survive loss, but to stop it from traveling any further.The Leaving, a companion to "Summer of Frogs," is a novel about motherhood without illusion, love as responsibility, and the hard, deliberate work of ending a cycle.