“Struggle To Freedom” by Aziza Ashanti

Derrick and Tammy live a picture perfect life: the beautiful house, two gorgeous kids and a marriage that is the envy of the PTA. But the childhood sweethearts know something their neighbours don’t; a dark secret too terrible to be spoken out aloud. Derrick and Tammy come from Heyvyn, a mountain town where in the backwaters of humanity, incest and sexual depravity have been left to fester.

Twenty years after their escape as teenagers, Tammy and Derrick’s new lives little resemble their formative years. A time when Tammy was betrothed to a criminal against her will, and when Derrick and his twin sister would sleep together in their father’s prostitution ring, or for his own sinister entertainment. Decades later they struggle to keep the past at bay, a murky series of traumas that only come to life at night while they’re sleeping.

Then, the unthinkable occurs when the specter of incest infects their innocent son and daughter.

Sick, confused and full of self loathing, Derrick receives an invitation to attend his mother’s birthday
celebration and finds himself once more beneath the shadow of the father who abused him, the sister he suffered beside and his psychopathic brother, a man who takes even greater pleasure in cruelty than their father ever did. Destruction looms as the ways of the past begin to engulf his once happy future, and as Tammy begins to fall back into the abuse she once escaped, it seems that only a divine miracle will redeem them from the depths of human anguish.

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