Voices Within

Bella doesn't speak. But she notices everything. Eight years in crates, on streets, in places where you don't live—you wait. Not a single day had been truly hers. Then came 1,861 days that were finally hers. Then January 5, 2018. Then, somehow, a continuation. This is fiction built from real life, based on the true story of the author's own rescued beagle, set against the real Illinois shelter Orphans of the Storm, where Bella became a local legend before anyone took her home.

Lana Stasek began writing for a reason she could not ignore. On her father's side, woman after woman developed dementia. First a word disappeared, then a name, then entire decades. One question remained: What if I am next? So she began writing while her memory was still her own. Before the page went blank. What came out was not a neat timeline. Memory rarely works that way. It reached back to an unborn brother erased before he arrived, a childhood in Eastern Ukraine...

This is a true story, but it sounds like fiction. Real life rarely follows rules, and memory never arrives in order. It simply shows up when it wants to. A girl drowns in a river while her parents sit on the shore holding bottles. A veteran returned from Afghanistan hangs off a ninth-floor balcony, not seeking death, but running out of places to scream. At a summer camp in 1986, children from Chernobyl appear quietly one morning, and a young girl realizes she can be the one drowning or the one pulling others under. Dreams fly freely until wires appear, revealing what they meant all along.