Burdened Legacy

Carmela Chambers has spent her entire life trying to forget her past, a past filled with painful secrets, that if exposed, will destroy lives-her own included. It was during the politically turbulent seventies in Kingston, Jamaica, on the heels of her mother's death, that young Carmela became the victim of a horrific sexual assault that left her traumatized and pregnant. Alone and desperate, she turned to the two women she trusted most-Pearl the family's domestic helper, and Mother Superior the nun who ran a local orphanage in the hills outside Kingston. Terrified that others including her father, a highly regarded politician, would find out what happened to her, arrangements were quickly made for Carmela's baby girl to be adopted in Canada-as far away as possible from the Chambers family and the hungry Jamaican tabloids. But thirty years later, old secrets threaten to re-emerge with the arrival of a young Canadian woman, Asia Stanton, the daughter Carmela gave up as a teen. Her quest is simple. Who is my father? Carmela, now a happily married obstetrician with three sons, must decide if Asia's need-to-know is worth the risk of destroying everything she holds dear in her life. Worse, lurking in the shadows are dangerous others who know Carmela's secrets. Silence, though, has a price. Even if it means murder.