A Gathered Radiance: Her dream life had become a nightmare...

(Revised and edited, May 2021) Kelly Matthews is seven years old when she learns to play the electric guitar. Pounding rock music takes her mind off the horrific nightmare that's haunted her dreams for as long as she can remember. It's always the same, first the darkness and then an awful sense of foreboding. Her heart pounds with mounting terror. Then comes a flickering montage of scenes of blazing houses, their roof trusses buckling in an inferno that even the torrential rain cannot douse. She's running for her life into a pitch-black forest. Bare tree branches claw her face. She hears the baying of tracker dogs then gunshots. The cries of the victims ring in her ears as she sobs, knowing she's powerless to save anyone, not even herself... Twenty years later, the bad dreams have faded away. Kelly has a successful career as a singer/songwriter and lead guitarist in an all-girl rock band. Her fans think she has it all, beauty, talent, unimaginable wealth and a happy marriage. In reality, her life is a cruel sham. When she's robbed and betrayed by her sadistic husband, Nigel, she publically humiliates him before fleeing to France to her brother's farmhouse. Once there, the re-occurring nightmare she suffered as a child becomes terrifyingly real. She's confronted by memories of another life in the war-torn Haute Savoie of 1943. Vilified by the world's press and hounded by her husband, before she can ever hope to reclaim her future, she must lay to rest a ghost from her turbulent past...

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