I LOVED this book! It starts out of the gate with a bang and never slows down. All of the characters are fully fleshed out, the story is tight and the twists build slowly until you begin to sense that something very, very bad may have happened. I raced through the chapters, needing to know the next events and trying to determine if I could figure out the why's and how's before it was told.
Mindy and her family have a perfect, beautiful life together, where everything is always shiny and bright............or so it seems. Slowly the seams start to unravel and you are on the edge of your seat waiting to find out what happens.... or happened in the past to get to this stage.
This a great, fast, intense read that sucked me in and didn't let go. I highly recommend it!
_________________________________________________
The follow-up to her critically acclaimed Lie to Me, J.T. Ellison’s TEAR ME APART is the powerful story of a mother willing to do anything to protect her daughter even as their carefully constructed world unravels around them.
One moment will change their lives forever…
Competitive skier Mindy Wright is a superstar in the making until a spectacular downhill crash threatens not just her racing career but her life. During surgery, doctors discover she’s suffering from a severe form of leukemia, and a stem cell transplant is her only hope. But when her parents are tested, a frightening truth emerges. Mindy is not their daughter.
Who knows the answers?
The race to save Mindy’s life means unraveling years of lies. Was she accidentally switched at birth or is there something more sinister at play? The search for the truth will tear a family apart…and someone is going to deadly extremes to protect the family’s deepest secrets.
With vivid movement through time, TEAR ME APART examines the impact layer after layer of lies and betrayal has on two families, the secrets they guard, and the desperate fight to hide the darkness within.
More Information
- Publisher: MIRA Books
- Original Release Date: August 28, 2018
- Formats: Paperback, eBook
- Paperback ISBN: 9780778330004
Prologue
University Hospital
Nashville, Tennessee
1993
Vivian
I remember the day she arrived so
clearly. What quirk of fate led her to me? I wondered about this for years. If only I had stepped right instead of left at the
corner, or taken the stairs instead of the elevator at the hospital, perhaps
ordered chicken instead of steak for my last meal with my father before his
death, the principles of chaos—the butterfly effect—would have altered the
course of my life enough that she wouldn’t have appeared. But I did step
right, and I took the elevator, and I had the steak, and she did appear, and I
will never recover from her.
*
It’s
my eighth Turkey Tetrazzini Tuesday. I push the food around on my tray, not
hungry. The meds they give me make me in turns nauseous and lacking in appetite and dinner is at five, anyway, only a
few hours away. If I feel better then, I’ll eat.
Everyone
else is happily communing with the glob of gray matter on their plates. They
don’t know any better. Half are drooling in their trays, the other half are tracing the voyage of little green men through
the gravy or wadding the tinfoil wrapping from their rolls into bouquets they
hang on their bedsteads to keep away the government spies. Suffice it to say we
don’t have anything common. I have no exciting diagnosis. I haven’t committed a
crime. I’m just depressed. Like, suicidal ideation with three attempts under my
belt depressed. Yes, it’s the bad kind.
I
wander back to my room, glancing in the doors of the rest of the ward.
Occasionally, the occupants leave out fun things to play with. Magazines. String. Cards. I’m not picky,
anything to break the tedium. I’m out of luck today. The rooms are spotless.
Beds are made, towels hang straight and
even, the whole ward smells of Pine-Sol. The janitors have been through. They will have pocketed anything of
worth.
I
bail on the reconnaissance mission and swing by my small hole for my
cigarettes. Four times a day, I am allowed to stand in a tiny six-by-six hutch
off the back steps and smoke. I can see the sky and
the huge brass padlock that, if opened, would give me my freedom, allow me to
step into the parking lot and disappear into the world, but nothing else.
Sometimes, I wonder if cigarette privileges are worth it. It must be how cows
feel, penned in day after day, never able to cross to the other field.
My
room, 8A, is white. White as week-old snow, the kind of white that isn’t crisp
and clean, but dirtied, institutional. You won’t see the exact shade anywhere
else. White walls, white bedding, white linoleum. White gowns. White
long-sleeved jackets with shiny silver buckles if we’re naughty.
Normally,
we’re all double-bunked, but I haven’t shared in a month, not since the last roommate was
sent home. As much as I hate her for getting out, I’ve found I enjoy the
silence of having my own space. Being
alone always frightened me before. I despised the dark and its creeping
pulchritude. Now, I crave its simplicity. Its emptiness and solitude. Caring
about fear is too hard anymore.
I
stop in the doorway. There is someone in my room.
Her
hair is dark and cascading, freshly washed; she reeks of the squeaky-clean
scent of Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. The hospital passes it out to all new
inductees in their plastic “welcome”
bucket.
She
sits on the bed, head cocked to the side, her back to the door, staring out the
four-by-two wire mesh screen window, which looks at the parking lot—bleak gray
asphalt and a never-ending parade of cars. It’s a
strange torture, this taste of freedom they give us. We are fish in the
aquarium; we can see the rest of the world passing by, disinterested people
living uninteresting lives.
This
intrusion into my private space infuriates me, and I slam back out to the nurses’ station. There is a nurse named Eleanor
Snow who runs the ward, but we all call her Ratchet
because she is a bitch. No one said we had to be original.
Ratchet
is calmly doing an intake form. Probably for my new roommate. Her serenity
infuriates me further. I don’t get serenity. My mind never quiets and allows me
to sit, smiling, as I fill in forms.
I
snarl at her, “Who is in my room?”
“Your
new roommate. I suggest you go introduce
yourself. And keep your hands to yourself. You don’t want me to cut your nails
again.”
I
shudder. I don’t, and she knows it.
“You
didn’t ask my permission to move someone in.”
“We
don’t have to. Now scat. I have work to do. And eat your dinner, or I’ll talk
with Dr. Freeman about your lack of eating.”
“Be
sure to tell him the meds he gives me make me puke.”
I
storm off. It’s the only power I have, not eating. They force the drugs in me, tell me when to sleep, shower, and
shit; make me sit in a circle with the other drooling idiots to share my story—you’ll
feel so much better after you’ve
talked it out, dear. No. No!
To
hell with the cigarette break. I head back to 8A, and the girl is still sitting
in the same spot, her head cocked the same way. She has long hands. They prop
her up, to the sides of her hips, as if they are grounding her to the world.
I
make noise, and she doesn’t turn. I step in front of the window, looming over
her so she’ll look at me. I snap my fingers under her nose, and she barely flinches.
Oh.