Piecing Me Together

For forty-eight years, Chelle Franklin had one word for her father: Sterling. No last name. No town. No photograph. Just a blank line on a birth certificate and a silence her mother would not break. She grew up loved and unprotected in the same house— raised by a grandmother who gave her everything, shadowed by a stepfather’s fists, and surrounded by grown-ups who all knew something they wouldn’t say.

For forty-eight years, Chelle Franklin had one word for her father: Sterling. No last name. No town. No photograph. Just a blank line on a birth certificate and a silence her mother would not break. She grew up loved and unprotected in the same house—raised by a grandmother who gave her everything, shadowed by a stepfather’s fists, and surrounded by grown-ups who all knew something they wouldn’t say.

For forty-eight years, Chelle Franklin had one word for her father: Sterling. No last name. No town. No photograph. Just a blank line on a birth certificate and a silence her mother would not break. She grew up loved and unprotected in the same house—raised by a grandmother who gave her everything, shadowed by a stepfather’s fists, and surrounded by grown-ups who all knew something they wouldn’t say.

In this fourth book, Chelle turns toward the people who made her—and finally, toward herself. Chapter Eight honors two grandmothers: Annelle, who raised her and never broke a promise, and Clarene, her father’s mother, whose love she’s only now getting the chance to know. Chapter Nine is the one she’s been building toward all along—her own story, told plain: childhood, marriage, motherhood at eighteen, a career built while raising four kids alone, and the quiet cost of growing up without a father.