Healing Touch

Nineteen-year-old Natasha Wakefield's innocence is taken from her on a hazy night, just weeks before the end of a great freshman year of college. She no longer feels safe and pulls away from her friends and family. Rather than going home to Riverview for the summer, she takes a dream internship at a local architecture firm, where she throws herself into work and tries to ignore the pain and bury it. But someone is watching her and will not let her forget.

Twenty-three-year-old Troy DeLuca has been trained since childhood to take over the family architecture practice, as his father and grandfather did before him. The day Natasha is hired as an intern, his carefully planned life begins to turn upside down. There is something strangely familiar about the quiet, subdued young woman, and painful memories he believed he had buried years ago start flooding back into his present.

The novel asks whether Troy's touch can heal the angry, raw wounds Natasha carries, whether she will keep shutting herself off and running, or whether she will find the strength to take her life back. It is a story about stolen innocence and the struggle to forget, forgive and move forward.

Content note: some content may be upsetting for some readers. The book contains references to rape and suicide.