My name is Abby Huxford, and in my twenty-seven years I’ve broken one hundred and seventeen bones.
     Well, I guess that’s not technically true, if I’m being pedantic. I’ve broken a bone one-hundred-seventeen times. My shin bone, the tibia? I’ve fractured it twice on the right, left one three times. I’ve snapped my humerus, the long, elegant bone that connects your shoulder to your elbow, four times on the left and a lucky seven on the right. I cracked my left hip while losing my virginity in the back seat of Colin Greer’s extended cab Ram Charger the summer before senior year — there’s a real Harlequin moment for you — and once when my best friend’s father hit a pothole hard while shuttling us to a Girl Scout meeting I managed to break my eleventh and twelfth ribs, a feat that impressed my doctors as that’s apparently hard to do.
     Add to that myriad fingers and toes, wrists and ankles, and you can see why I’ve spent my life convalescing. One Christmas when I was in junior high, we gave Momma one of those picture frames that cycles through images every few seconds. In subsequent years, if you visited our simple house nestled among the cedar groves and limestone cliffs of the Texas Hill Country and noticed the little screen in its spot on the bookcase, you’d likely have been taken aback by two details as images of family vacations and backyard barbecues scrolled by.
     First, in all of them — every single one, swear to God — I had some body part encased in a plaster cast as I did my feeble best to smile for the camera. And second, the burly man with silver tips and a neatly-trimmed beard standing next to me, smiling with his hand on my shoulder or around my waist or sitting me on his lap, had bright blue eyes. Not the corny blue eyes you read about in those romance novels I routinely turn down in my job as a New York literary agent, “piercing” eyes you could “swim in.” No, I’m talking about the whites of his eyes, the nimbus surrounding his battleship gray iris. His were a cobalt blue, a strange ocular affliction that made him look like a character from Dune. Blue eyes that made you look twice. Blue eyes that made your gaze linger.
     Blue eyes just like mine.

I don’t remember ever having a conversation where some doctor sat me down and said, “Abby, you have Osteogenesis Imperfecta.” It was just always there, a fact of life, a genetic disorder that left me with those bright blue eyes and bones as brittle as bird wings. They say fish don’t know they’re wet, and the younger me only knew a life of that familiar crunching’s electric crackle of pain followed by a trip to the glowing red marquee I recognized as the words “Emergency Room” before I was old enough to read them. It didn’t help that I was tomboyish and fine-limbed, and once I started school, the frequency of my showing up to class sporting a new cast was such that by second grade my classmates quit signing them as the novelty had worn off. What a gyp.
     It was spending my formative years recuperating that fostered in me my love of books. I started with the usual fare but quickly outgrew vampires and Muggles. By freshman year of high school, our time spent in the west Texas desert on family getaways led me to Annie Proulx. A trip to Alabama for a high school band competition steered me toward To Kill a Mockingbird and a Southern Gothic phase. A London summer trip to see The Mousetrap ended with my devouring Agatha Christie which steered me to Gillian Flynn. Then it was on to Margaret Atwood and Louisa May Alcott and Emily Dickinson — you get the idea. Generational roles flipped as my parents, tired of shuttling hardbacks between bookcases, offered to buy me a Kindle, but I threw a tantrum at the prospect of being made to read on an electronic device. I preferred the heft of physical books, the smell of fresh paper and ink that drifted up when you opened them for the first time, the way a glance at their spines triggered memories of being transported. And it was in those years of limping about with my nose buried in a novel that I came to know I would make my living with the written word.
     What was impossible to foresee then, though, was how that decision would eventually lead like a train of dominoes to the tragic events in this story. I don’t mean to sound maudlin. I mean, those same events led to a book deal of my own, the book you’re about to read. At first I struggled with the task of making this narrative new since you’re sure to have heard about the events on the news. After all, at one point a friend of mine vacationing in Greece texted to say she’d just seen my picture on CNN at the hotel bar for crying out loud. But going back to my first draft with fresh eyes, the eyes of the literary agent I was and am, I immediately saw it read like a three hundred page Wikipedia entry. It was a bland recitation of the facts, completely devoid of soul. And that’s when I decided hell with it, I’m just going to let it all hang out.
     Because the events in this book changed me irrevocably. My life will never be the same and I’ll never be the person I was before.
And it all started with Amoret. Amoret, and the events of that cold desert winter spent with the man-child Raul “Rulo” Gatlin.