As Lark and Zach begin to share small details of their losses, their shame, their guilt, feelings they have never shared with anyone else, emotional intimacy cannot help but follow.īut Zach has had a lot more time to deal with his grief than Lark has, and even his burgeoning love for her cannot 'fix' her PTSD, no matter how hard he wishes it could. It was a part of it, but only in a casual way. Diligent, quiet, feeling not quite part of the tight-knit family community at the Shipley farm, Zach knows what it is like to feel apart, to live 'in the bunkhouse of life': 'annexed to the farm. Zach, too, has shouldered his share of grief, losing his family and his community after being kicked out of the polygamous religious group in which he was born and raised when he was just a teen. It is Zach, the most cautious of the farmworkers, who takes it upon himself to help Lark through her night terrors, shaking her awake, or soothing her with his voice and with his touch when the nightmares return. But while her conscious brain knows she's safe on her best friend's rural family farm, at night, the 'dragons in my heart,' shake their chains and roar-in the form of scream-inducing nightmares, nightmares that jerk the male farmhands from their own dreams in the bunkhouse they all share.

Lark smiles and acts 'normal,' determined to defeat her jumpiness, her illogical fear. Lark grieves not only for her lost sense of invincibility ('Back then I'd thought that bad experiences only made for good stories' ), but for one of her kidnappers, a young boy who was killed during her rescue. In Sarina Bowen's Keepsake, the third book of her Truth North series, the grieving protagonist is Lark, a once fearless risktaker who is spending time on a Vermont farm recovering from being kidnapped while on a twelve-month assignment for her job with a NGO in Guatemala.

Pansies by Alexis Hall