Before You Were Mine: She built her life on love and silence. Only one of those was holding

Ruth Coleman has been holding this family together for thirty years

She does not think of it as holding. She thinks of it as love. She thinks of it as making good food and keeping a clean house and showing up at Greater Zion Baptist Church every Sunday and knowing which smile to wear for which occasion and being the woman Jerome Coleman is proud to stand beside. She thinks of it as what a wife does, what a mother does, what a woman does when she has decided that the peace of her household is worth whatever it costs her to maintain it.
This Thanksgiving, the cost finally becomes something she cannot pay.

BEFORE YOU WERE MINE is the opening novel of The Sins We Carry Home, a six-book series about one Atlanta family's long reckoning with love, silence, harm, and the particular courage it takes to finally tell the truth. Told from the inside of a family that looks, from the outside, exactly the way a family is supposed to look, it asks the question that only the most honest stories dare to ask: what does a woman owe her family, and what does she owe herself, and what happens on the day she can no longer pretend those two things are the same?

Diana drove down from Buckhead for Thanksgiving. She plans to be here three days and go home. She does not plan for her mother to say the thing her mother has never said. She does not plan to sit at a kitchen table on a cold November morning and finally, after thirty-two years, hear the name of the thing she has been carrying.

By the time you reach the last page, Ruth Coleman will be sitting at that same kitchen table in the middle of the night, writing a letter that has been thirty years in the making. You will understand exactly why it took her that long. And you will not be able to put this series down.

Warm, honest, devastating, and built on the deep love at the centre of even the most damaged families - The Sins We Carry Home begins here.