My Mother Flushed My Ashes

Summary

I was eighteen when they finally brought me home—the biological daughter they had spent a decade searching for. But I was broken, stuttering, and semi-mute from years of neglect. Coral, the girl they had adopted to replace me, was everything I wasn’t: radiant, polished, and effortlessly perfect.

It didn’t take long for my mother’s guilt to sour into resentment. To spare herself the embarrassment of my existence, she let Coral convince her to pack me off to a "therapeutic boarding school" deep in the Oregon wilderness—a closed reform camp designed to fix broken girls like me.