J. L. Seegars

Sloane: Dominic Alexander is my late husband's best friend and the last man that I should want. For the last ten years, he's taken a sick pleasure in making me feel paper thin, like my existence is of no consequence to him at all. But now, things are different. After a drunken night, and a...

Mallory: Hope is a dangerous thing. It holds you close like a lover, whispering promises it never intends to keep, and just as soon as you relax into its arms, it lets you go. Sending you spinning into an abyss of nothingness. When I sent him away four years ago, he promised he would come back...

Mallory: The day Christopher Johnson decided to kill me, I already knew what it was like to die. I had already experienced it once. Having the life leeched from my body, blood stolen from my veins, oxygen pulled from my lungs. When he decided to walk back into my life, I was in the middle of my...

Something awful and illuminating happens when a marriage ends. All illusions fade away. Light spills into the darkest corners of the union, forcing you to face the cracks. The moments bereft of love. The nights without affection. The days spent learning to be quiet and still, expecting nothing...

Mallory The first time I kissed Christopher Johnson, I knew he would be my biggest mistake. It was supposed to be a simple business arrangement, a few months of playing a role that came far too easily to the both of us, but it wasn't long before it became more. Love. Devotion. Heartbreak in its...

Jaxon Daniels was supposed to be my forever. I've loved him since I was thirteen years old, and like a foolish little girl, I believed that our love would carry us through everything. Every challenge. Every obstacle. Every heartbreak. But that was before I knew anything about pain and the...

Loving someone with demons is hard but leaving them is harder. That's a lesson I learned roughly a decade ago when I left the love of my life. Choosing the child we made but weren't ready for over any hope for what could be.

I expect nothing. From life, from God, from men. I don't hope or want or pray. Those are luxuries I can't afford when I'm doing the desperate math of survival while walking the tight rope of life on the run in a strange city. New Haven wasn't supposed to be a fresh start.