Sydney James – Rag Doll Girls (2021)

I was five when I discovered that adults don’t know everything. It was the weirdest feeling, sitting across from the policeman at my grandmother’s cottage, listening to him telling me that what had happened to Ellen was an accident. No one’s fault. She was in a better place now, he said.
I couldn’t believe that he didn’t know. That he couldn’t tell, just by looking at me. And I wanted to tell him the truth, I really did. Tell someone. The kind policeman, my loving grandmother, anyone. Even my unforgiving sister. But they all seemed convinced they knew what had happened, and anyway, there weren’t any words to describe the unforgettable sights I’d witnessed.
In the end, I never told anyone what I had seen. And once my parents had come to get me, I never returned to my grandmother’s cottage. Wild horses couldn’t have dragged me back. As soon as I could, I moved far away, halfway around the world, and did all I could to forget.
But repressed memories and untold secrets have a way of resurfacing, and when my life implodes three decades later, I’m forced to return by something much more relentless than wild horses: my perfect older sister. Forced to go back to our grandmother’s cottage and find out which fragments of my nightmares were the results of my vivid childhood imagination and which are based on facts.