Silver in the Hacky Sack
READING AGE 16+
Nell Vance is fifteen, and the only thing she has ever been able to count on is her mother's hand on her forehead and her sisters' weight against her side.
When her uncle's strap puts her in the dirt, she wakes with a right hand that burns when it touches something valuable. She doesn't know what it means. She knows the doctor wants money, and there is a silver coin hidden in an old toy that no one in the family will talk about.
Nell starts selling eggs. Then scrap. Then silver. Every dollar is a small mercy and a new danger. Her grandmother wants her quiet. The county wants its cut. The men who buy and sell want to know where a fifteen-year-old gets silver.
What Nell wants is to keep her sisters fed and her mother safe, and to walk out of that house without leaving them behind.
This is not a romance. It is a story about who you save when you can't save everyone.
I wrote this for readers who want the ache of family love with a ledger underneath.
Unfold
One Pitcher a Day
The room went quiet.
Her mother's hand came down off her shoulder and lay along the blanket. She didn't say anything else about the money, and she didn't say anything back to the woman in the second bed. She lay with her eyes on the ceiling until they shut.
Nell waited where……
Waiting for the first comment……