Stealing children is not the exclusive patent of our country, where unscrupulous nuns and midwives as well as rich people eager to become parents by any means carried out the most sinister robberies, those who traded in new lives taken from the mother's bed.
Really the evil of the human being has a surprising capacity for replication.
Children were also stolen in the United States. And this novel rescues one of the most striking cases that shook the entire American society.
We start from 1939 in Memphis, the family of Rill Foss and his four brothers is not a typical, orderly family, with their traditional home and with resources to maintain and ensure both a worthy present and future.
What happened that night is blurred between the memories of some children and the tragic feeling of the oldest, Rill, that nothing would be the same again.
All of them ended up in an orphanage, separated from their parents for God knew what good or the interest of the little ones. Under the easy excuse that certain households were not capable of supporting children, atrocities of separations were committed as real robberies to satisfy other types of interests of more affluent families.
But that Rill and his brothers did not know in those stressful moments when they struggled to stay together. A tragic time burned into the oldest of the boys and hidden as a vague memory in the case of the others.
Time does not heal anything, it only deals with covering the wounds with dressings that make it impossible to see what the skin has engraved on by the accident.
Until chance takes care of digging intensely into that wound ...
Avery Stafford, we wouldn't recognize her by that name. Many years have passed and from his childhood in the unique house-boat anchored in the Mississippi nothing remains. Because their reality has been different. You have enjoyed and taken advantage of opportunities to grow and prosper.
But that moment has arrived, presented as pure chance. Although perhaps all chance is nothing more than a subconscious search focused on any detail that sparks the spark.
In the end Avery will have to look in the mirror of the past, with that heavy load of guilt buried among the advantages that his other life offered him. A difficult journey into the depths of the lives of stolen children ...
You can now buy the novel Before you arrived, Lisa Wingate's book, here: