Secondhand Sister

Mary-Esther Sloat is a woman with a patchwork past—three failed marriages, misspent youth, and a series of dead-end jobs. When she attempts to donate a kidney to her dying mother, she learns a life-altering truth: Loretta Boudreau Day is not her biological mother. After Loretta dies, Hurricane Katrina destroys Mary-Esther’s only tie to New Orleans—her beloved Nana’s house. For a while, Mary-Esther lives in a battered Chevy van. Armed with a faded birth certificate, she finally corrals the courage to unravel the mystery of her birth at a small hospital in the panhandle of Florida.

When she finds the site of the hospital, she is dismayed to learn it now houses the Gadsden County Sheriff’s office. Sergeant Jerry Blount befriends Mary-Esther and helps her locate a retired nurse who once worked at the small hospital. After meeting with the senior in a near-by assisted living facility, Mary-Esther visits the county courthouse to research records for children born on the same date. She discovers a baby girl with a similar last name—Sarah Davis of Chattahoochee, a small town in the same county.

Hattie Davis Lewis lives with her husband Holston and adopted child Sarah Chuntian Lewis in the old family homestead three miles south of Chattahoochee, Florida. She often thinks of her older sister, a child also named Sarah who died shortly after birth. Hattie’s older brother Bobby Davis, wife, and son live nearby on the family land. Bobby battles his own demons that threaten his hard-won sobriety.

Mary-Esther camps out in her van at a lake near Chattahoochee, hesitant to confront the family she suspects to be her own. She takes a server job at the Homeplace Restaurant in town. Hattie Davis worries about a series of anonymous phone calls and the frequent sightings of a strange van circling her driveway. Is someone casing the house?

Instead of welcoming arms, Mary-Esther finds a clannish community and a brother determined to keep her from claiming her birthright.

The strange and twisted journey between her old life in New Orleans and her new life in Chattahoochee forces Mary-Esther’s darkest fears and deepest longings to the surface.

Is it possible to blend the person she believed she was with the person she never had the chance to be?