Ashley's Story: Enough

The handsome husband. The three beautiful children. The big house in the right Chicago suburb, the holidays that ran like clockwork because she made them run that way.

But having it all isn't the same as being seen. And somewhere between the school pickups and the dinner parties and the long years of putting herself last, Ashley disappeared.

Then the children grew up and moved away, and the house went quiet. Too quiet. She and Troy could pass whole days barely speaking, the silence broken only by his sharp little comments and the easy laughter in his voice the moment a friend or a coworker called. Ashley had never felt so alone as she did sitting in the same room as her own husband.

When her mother leaves on a long-awaited trip to Europe, Ashley jumps at the chance to come home to Glenn Lake and help her recovering father. Helping her parents is the reason she gives everyone. The silence she is running from is the one she keeps to herself. Just for a few weeks, she tells herself. She rents a little house a few streets from her parents and starts unpacking one box at a time.

And in the slow rhythm of the town that still remembers the girl she used to be, Ashley finally lets herself face the truth. About her marriage. About Troy. About the woman she set aside so long ago she isn't sure she can find her again.

She can keep pretending. Or she can start over at almost fifty, with nothing figured out and everything left to learn.

Because somewhere along the way, Ashley forgot the one word that could save her. Enough. Enough of the silence. Enough of the invisible years. Enough of making herself small so someone else could feel large. And, just as she is, simply enough.

An honest, emotional story about marriage, motherhood, and the courage it takes to start over, even at almost fifty, Ashley's Story: Enough is the seventh book in the Finding Herself series.

Books can be read in any order, but best for characters development to be read in order.