The Forgotten Daughter's Return

From her earliest memories, a young girl has known only her mother's screams and blows, the woman locked away in a storm cellar while her father keeps the house. Then, at eight, her mother speaks gently and asks for one phone call, promising the beatings will end. The girl breaks her own arm to create a distraction, and luxury cars soon tear down the dirt road. The man leading them, Julian Vance, beats her father and frees her mother from the cellar deep in the mountains.

But her mother wants nothing to do with her. She calls the girl the spawn of a kidnapper and turns to Julian and to a boy named Lucas, showering them with a tenderness the girl has never known. Julian has her locked in a cage beside a snarling mastiff, then banished to a damp basement in his vast estate, where she scrubs floors before dawn while Lucas is given every toy he wants.

Still the girl chases after her mother's warmth, and still she is shoved away. What she cannot understand is why these people, who despise her so, will one day weep over her body and call her their real child.