The Weight of Glass

“Long ago my childhood became a graveyard for the shipwrecks of memory. Broken masts lay compressed along its shoreline. Like inverted crosses rising from the water, the emotional events of youth scuttled upon shallow rocks and slipped gently into its currents. Throughout the years I found forgetting an acceptable form of therapy; my demonstration of its ability masterful.
But then I’m sure the children who suffered as we did, seek out love affairs with razor blades and the comfort food of pills and wine. Anyone can tell you reminders fade away, but honestly, it’s easier forgetting when you’re dead. Because if we seek hard enough to stir the clouds of memory, those things we learned to drown below the surface, every now and then they find a way back. And it’s only then the realization is made. Sometimes dead is better.”

Hidden in the haunted words of Amy Macon’s indelible memoir, as much a work in progress as a survival guide for a torturous childhood, is the need to stitch together her brother’s dark secrets, those terrible mysteries surrounding the destruction of their family, ones she knows shaped the fabric of all their lives.
For Lee Macon, growing up was painful; he can’t forget waking up inside his mother’s coffin or, sometimes, the image of the man that put him there. Even after three decades, he hasn’t stopped drowning every godforsaken memory in a bottle.
It is here, torn between the lines of a sister’s unfinished manuscript and the darker truths of a desperate brother, that the beautiful pull of Fripp Island comes alive in Stuart Heatherington’s page-turning novel, The Weight of Glass.
Amy, Lee’s sole surviving sister, plans to meet him at Rabbit’s Hole, the family’s old beach house, to scatter their baby sister’s ashes where they belong. Even though it’s been years since Darla went missing, Lee still doesn’t know why the hell it matters; they already buried her once before. But a promise made is a promise kept. Besides, it’ll help Amy erase some of the scars from her psyche, if not the memory of the ones on her wrists. And he needs it too. If anything, Darla died because of him.
Back then, years ago as a battered teenager, Lee decided to take revenge on Warren Tucker, their abusive stepfather and the minister of the local town, by stuffing the hymnals with evidence of his corruption. Half out of his mind, Lee wasn’t sure which, or maybe he just didn’t care. All the same, he was throwing a match on a volatile situation. But enough was enough. Warren’s violent nature had only worsened in the wake of Lee’s mother’s death, and he and his siblings had been scarred forever.
Now only the two of them remain alive. And over the course of three days, Lee will find himself blindsided by his sister’s resolve, drug through the past by the corners of a broken heart and forced to remember a decade old pledge. Amy tells him it’s time to dig up the dead; she needs to finish writing her memoir, and only Lee can help find the bones buried the deepest. But if there’s any hope of absolution, for burying the past Amy means to exhume in her book, they must find a way to save each other first. Because it may be the last chance they get.