Sincerely, Emma

I used to be the perfect daughter of Samantha and Harold Evans.

I had everything I could ever want - we lived in a large mansion that had a mile long driveway, lined with red oak trees. Our three story brick home has five acres of nice, normal, grassy yard, a large patch of which is taken over by my mother’s garden. The rest of our land, all four hundred, ninety-five acres, are woods. We’ve got walking paths, our own little campsites, and all that. Well, they do - I did.

My name is Emma Valerie Evans. I’m nineteen now, and traveling. I don’t know where I’m going yet, all I know is that I had to get as far away from that prison as I possibly could - for a prison was what my ‘home’ had become.

They wanted me married off, to the wealthy son of one of my father’s associates. It didn’t matter which associate - from the time I was seventeen, I was meeting any wealthy business owner’s son who was aged fourteen to twenty-seven. I wasn’t interested, and when they were out, on their own vacation, I took action. I got my bank papers, withdrew my money, and opened another account specifically in my name. I got myself a credit card, which took a short period of time, given who my father was, and then…I left.

In my wake, I left a letter for my parents on the kitchen table - only one of many they would get after I left.

And in all my haste to get away, the thing I probably least expected was to run into one of the sons I was trying to hard to escape from…and, as least-likely things tend to do, that’s exactly what happened.