CHAPTER ONE
DR JESSICA FREUD
Three days ago, my family and I uncovered a secret history with the power to change dreams. When we opened two padlocked ironbark boxes, belonging to my great-great-grandma, Seraphina Pearl, her secrets escaped and flew unleashed into the twenty-first century catching us in a slipstream, which is already reshaping the certainty of our lives. The effect is potent enough to make me reconsider why I’m here, and I can imagine the radical alchemy to come, but here’s the thing, an hour before we opened Seraphina’s boxes we didn’t know they were there.
I come from three generations of enigmatic grandmothers, which is why Seraphina’s revelations came as such a surprise, and I can practically hear what you’re thinking. What kind of secrets? What was Seraphina so anxious to hide? Why does her secrecy matter now? I don’t want to get ahead of myself, a story like this needs time to unfold, but across several generations in any family, there’s bound to be long term fallout from things such as yearning and infidelity, ambition warped by obsession, illness, betrayal, and all the cathartic upheavals that lovers and mothers carry through their lives, and as far as I’m concerned, no grandma in any modern family outshines the courage and patience of Seraphina Pearl.
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