Carrie opened her eyes and looked at the glow in the dark stars painted on her bedroom ceiling. Her mother did that for her when she was nine, a year before she died. She traced one of the stars with her finger, remembering what her mother said about them. “You can reach for the stars with your heart and your mind.”  Her mother constantly encouraged her to be bold. She understood Carrie’s need to make her own choices, whenever the opportunity presented itself. Limited by her circumstances, she yearned for freedom. Self-doubt, a loving but overprotective father, and the facts of her life, made the kind of freedom teenagers took for granted, seem as unreachable as the starts on her ceiling.  

She rolled...

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