Ruth Erskine's Crosses

Ruth Erskine has been the queen of her father's home for eighteen years, beloved and sheltered, the sole mistress of all she surveys. Then her father returns from a trip with a wife he married years ago, and a daughter Ruth never knew existed. Suddenly the home she cherished is no longer hers alone. The new mother is cold and calculating; the new sister is jealous and cruel. Ruth finds herself a stranger in her own life, banished to the margins of the family she once ruled. The question becomes unbearable: how will she carry this cross of humiliation, betrayal, and loss? Written with delicate psychological insight, this Victorian domestic drama explores the quiet torture of displaced affection and the harder still path of responding to cruelty with grace. It's a story about what happens when everything you believed about your life proves false, and whether faith can survive the wreckage of your expectations.