Anastasia Zadeik is a writer, editor, and storyteller. After graduating summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with a BA in psychology from Smith College, she had an international career in neuropsychological research while raising her children. She now serves as Director of Operations for the San Diego Writers Festival, as a coproducer of the San Diego Memoir Showcase, and as a mentor and board member for the literary nonprofit So Say We All. She also sits on the board of the International Memoir Writers Association.

A frequent performer of narrative non-fiction in a hushed bar or on a stage, her work has appeared in the San Diego Decameron Project, LitHub, writeordietribe.com, and the award-winning anthology Shaking the Tree: Short. Brazen. Memoir. Her debut novel, Blurred Fates (She Writes Press, August 2022), won the 2023 Sarton Award for Contemporary Fiction and the 2023 National Indie Excellence Award for Contemporary Fiction. She lives in San Diego with her husband and their empty-nest rescue dog, Charlie.

Kate Whittier has it all—a loving, even-keeled husband, two great kids, and a beautiful home in Southern California. But Kate is living a lie. In a desperate attempt to create for her children the safe, happy family she never had, she has been hiding dark secrets for decades—things she’s convinced make her unworthy of her wellborn husband, Jacob, and the privileged life he has provided.

Then, one ordinary evening, always dependable Jacob confesses to a drunken sexual indiscretion he doesn’t quite remember, and Kate cracks open. Molten memories rise to the surface: hiding in the dark, her brother’s whisper in her ear; crying out, knowing no one will hear. Along with the memories, volatile emotions swirl—a sign, Kate fears, that the mental illness that took her mother has finally come for her.

Stepping in to support Kate and Jacob as their lives unravel is the guy who introduced them: Ryan McCann, a peripatetic journalist who has recently settled nearby to write his first novel. Ryan was with Jacob on the night of the indiscretion. Ryan is with Kate when Jacob leaves. And when Kate’s malevolent older brother calls with news of her father’s imminent death, it is Ryan who accompanies her as she journeys back to her childhood home looking for closure. Instead, as the past invades the present and relationships collide, Kate discovers complicated truths that could mean redemption—or destroy her entire world.

When Julia Reeves loses her beloved father at seventeen, her world goes dark. One day after her eighteenth birthday, she checks into an inpatient psychiatric facility, looking for answers—and finds fellow suicide survivor Sam Lorenzo.

A brilliant, enigmatic, twenty-three-year-old photographer struggling with bipolar disorder, Sam’s passion for art and poetry brings light back into Julia’s life. So when he begs her to escape with him to embark on a cross-country odyssey and fulfill their wildest dreams, Julia agrees. Within hours, she’s shopped at Saks, dined in a Michelin-starred restaurant, and learned that Sam doesn’t believe in mood-stabilizing medication.

Before she can even absorb what she’s done, the two young lovers are on the run.

Meanwhile, informed that Julia has disappeared and the powers that be will do nothing to find her, Julia’s mother, Laura, forms an uneasy alliance with the one person who as much to lose as she does: Sam’s mother, Arabella. Armed with only a handful of clues—a missing photograph of Half Dome cut from its frame, a second-chance bucket list Julia left behind, and a cryptic text from an unknown number—the two mothers embark on a journey of their own, hoping to save their kids before they are lost forever.