Family
Secrets
Secrets
and Second Chances Book 1
by
Donna M. Zadunajsky
Genre:
Mystery, Suspense
467
pages
Alexis
has had big dreams all her life, and she’s worked hard to make them
happen! After college, she married and had a beautiful baby boy,
living her dream as “Mommy” until Colton was safely entrenched in
grade school. She lands her dream job at NASA, and her supportive
husband, Jay, takes the lead on raising their son. The perfect
family, right?
Twelve
years later with no warning and no reason, Jay commits suicide.
Colton goes into denial and blames his mother; Alexis buries herself
in her work.
Seven
months later, Alexis’s biggest dream comes true. She’s going to
be on the next space shuttle! Her victory is short-lived when she
finds out she has breast cancer. As her health declines, Colton
delves into the dangerous circumstances of his father’s
death.
“Family
Secrets” crept into Alexis’s life when she wasn’t paying
attention. Will she and her son ever find out the truth? Or is it too
late?
One
Was life fair? Not in the least. Not when you worked your ass off for everything you’ve ever dreamed of and poof, in an instant, with one sentence…it was gone!
Life doesn’t always work out the way we want. No matter what you’ve done or how you’ve done it, something without a doubt gets in the way. You could spend days, weeks, months, even years working for the things you want out of life, only for it to be taken from you as if your dreams and schemes never existed. As if you had never tried at all…
It’s funny how life seems to work out the opposite of what we want. Why bother to dream at all if they never come to fruition? But, if we don’t have our dreams and goals to motivate and guide us, where would we be in this world? Lost, stumbling aimlessly, and not driven by desire, blood, sweat, and tears!
We’ve all heard the phrase, “Life isn’t fair,” so why are we so defeated when things don’t turn out our way? When everything seems to fall apart? Shouldn’t we just keep trying? “If you fall down, get back up, dust yourself off, and try again.”
But what if…just to be fair in this unfair world…what if we weren’t meant to have those dreams at all? What if they were only to teach us something we didn’t see in ourselves? What if there was something better than our dreams waiting for us on the path of life?
Hidden
Secrets
Secrets
and Second Chances Book 2
231
pages
...
Hidden Secrets will leave you questioning everything you thought you
knew...
Carla
Michaels’s life isn't what she thought it was. She met her loving
husband in college. She had a career as a teacher. All she ever
wanted to complete her life was a baby. After five miscarriages,
Carla had almost given up hope of ever becoming a mother.
Then
a devastating tragedy strikes and everything she had ever loved is
gone—now she’s left torn and shattered, wondering if she can go
on with life.
Unexpectedly,
she receives an envelope full of books. Journals that were kept
hidden from her. A mystery starts to play out as secrets are
revealed.
Will
she get a second chance at life? Will the hidden secrets destroy her?
Or will she find the strength to survive once she knows the
truth?
“Hidden
Secrets” will pull at your heartstrings until the very last page.
Some secrets are not meant to be hidden…
Prelude:
What would you do if you found a book, a journal hidden away, filled with secrets—things you weren’t meant to know; things you should’ve known from the beginning?
So the question remains, how well does anyone really know his or her own spouse, sister, brother, mother, or father?
You could be living under the same roof for five, ten, even twenty years, and not really know one another. Even before they became your significant other, did their parents or siblings know them better than anyone else did? Did your family keep things hidden?
Siblings don’t always share their secrets with each other. They are not close. They most likely won’t get along with one another until they become adults, and still maybe even then, not see eye to eye!
What if you’re an only child, no one with which to share anything? What if one day you’re all alone? Your parents or spouse dies, goes to heaven, and you one-day stumble across a secret that your so-called loved ones have been hiding from you. What would you do? Of course, you would read it. You wouldn’t be able to help yourself. You would be too curious the moment you opened the book and read the first line. Especially, if you saw your name written as one of the words.
What if everything you thought you knew about your family, your spouse, your lover were all lies? Something they thought was better kept hidden from the one person they supposedly loved the most.
Even then, no one really knows anyone, do they?
Twisted
Secrets
Secrets
and Second Chances Book 3
285
pages
Craven
Falls, Ohio, is a small town with twenty-eight hundred residents—a
town where everyone knows almost everyone else and where nothing ever
happens, until one day two children disappear.
Ashley
Teodora spends her days juggling work, school, and her five-year-old
daughter, Lily. She receives a phone call from her best friend, Carla
Michaels, needing her to go to Illinois to help Carla who is going
through a tough time in her life. When Ashley returns home, she
receives horrifying news that turns her world upside down; her
precious Lily has been abducted!
Reece
Garran is released from prison after a five-year sentence. His
primary goal is to find the woman whose memory kept him alive all
those years while behind bars. This woman had captured his heart and
wouldn’t let go. When the transport bus pulls into the town of
Craven Falls, Reece thinks it’s just another small ordinary town
until he finds a reason to stay.
Catherine
Teodora, Ashley’s mother, loves crocheting, baking, gardening, and
spending time with her granddaughter, Lily. On a beautiful sunny
Sunday afternoon, Catherine’s world is torn to pieces. All she did
was look away for a split-second, and Lily was gone!
A
family pulls together in a time of need, but what happens when those
that are close to you are hiding behind twisted secrets? Will they
stand by one another and find Lily? Or will the secrets tear this
family apart?
1
F
or months, Tate had done nothing but watch, plan, and learn everything about Ashley. She was beautiful, but that didn’t do a woman justice, not in the world we lived in today. Beauty was just the half of it.
He watched Ashley wake in the morning. She didn’t know that he could see everything she did. Like when she made her coffee, adding cream and two sugars; then stirred, and tapping the spoon twice before setting it down on the red ceramic spoon-holder next to the coffeepot.
The way she gathered her blonde hair and twisted it into a bun on the top of her head before she crawled under the covers at night to read for exactly one-half-hour before placing the book down on the nightstand and clicking off the light.
Ashley repeated this routine every day—from the moment she woke in the morning to the time she picked up her daughter Lily from her mother’s place three miles down the road every evening. Although, on occasion, there were nights she didn’t come home. That was when she’d sleep over at her boyfriend’s house and her sweet little daughter stayed with her grandma.
Tate had on several occasions camped out and watched the grandmother who lived by herself in a two-story house surrounded by woods. Those woods made it an easy place to hide and watch the grandmother.
The grandma’s house was much easier than Ashley’s place to watch because Ashley lived in an apartment. There was no place to really hide so that was when he rented the apartment across the parking lot from her. It gave him a direct view into her home.
The grandma had been a grieving widow for some time. At least that’s what he’d gathered since Tate had never seen a man at her place. He watched her from time to time, but not as often as he followed Ashley around because she was who intrigued him the most.
The child, Lily, was almost a spitting image of Ashley, except for one thing; her long-wavy black hair, which Tate assumed, came from her father’s side of the family. He’d never seen the little girl’s father to know if she looked anything like him. The little girl’s father wasn’t in the picture. He hadn’t been for as long as Tate had been watching them. Tate hadn’t any clue where the sperm donor went or what happened to him—to them. Did they have a fight? Or did he just ditch her the moment he found out Ashley was pregnant with his baby? That would be something only God knew.
It was sad to see Ashley raise this child alone, but that would change in time. She would come to see that Tate was good for her. It would only take a little push in the right direction, and Tate knew just what to do to get her to see what love was. Show Ashley how wonderful and true it could be.
Ashley’s so-called boyfriend wasn’t who she thought he was. He wasn’t true to her. He didn’t love her the way a man should love a woman, especially someone as beautiful and smart as her—like Ashley. Her name sounded so sweet rolling off his tongue every time he said it.
As for the little girl, Lily, she would learn to love him and worship him. She would never be without a father again. A man who would give her everything she would ever need—want, but that would all come soon enough. Soon they would know all about him. Soon Ashley would be with him.
Because after today the cat would come out to play…
Donna
M. Zadunajsky started out writing children’s books before she
accomplished and published her first novel, Broken Promises, in June
2012. She then has written several more novels and her first novella,
HELP ME!, which is a subject about suicide and bullying.
Her
third novel Family Secrets, “Secrets and Second Chances”, which
is first in a series she is writing, was given a publishing contract
through California Times Publishing.
Follow
the tour HERE
for exclusive excerpts and a giveaway!
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