The lives of the Sanders clan would forever be shrouded in secrecy. On the outside they were a perfectly normal family: Mother, father, three children. It was only on the inside that, if you looked closely enough, you could see the tatters and frayed edges. Lisa and Ryan Edwards were high school sweethearts who stayed together longer than they should have because of an accidental pregnancy. When, in 1980, Lisa discovered she was pregnant with the couple's first child, a boy who would be named Luke, the options open to the couple were few and far between. At the encouragement, or insistance, of both families, Lisa and Ryan were married in a small, swift ceremony, and the course of their lives would be forever altered. For a while, the family of three kept up happy appearances, but when Lisa became pregnant with another child in 1984, a girl who would be named Constance, tiny cracks began to form, tiny cracks that could have been patched over if anyone had been paying attention.

The death blow to the Sanders family would come in mid-1986 when Lisa once again discovered she was pregnant. The pregnancy, as unplanned as the two that came before it, split open the rift between husband and wife. Ryan refused to believe the child was his and Lisa couldn't definitively say one way or another. Regardless of paternity, the couple's third child, a girl named Charlotte, would be born at midday on February 28. Ryan joked, seriously, that he wished the child had been born in a leap year, saying it would be just like she'd never really existed in the first place. That was how Charlotte came into the world, unwanted and just barely loved. The household of Lisa and Ryan was cold, but there was always an undercurrent of what could be, the violent temper of Ryan Edwards always simmering just below the surface. With three children to feed and an unhappy wife to entertain, that temper almost always went off. The great question became why the couple chose to stay together, and in the end the reasoning was purely selfish: Neither wanted to give the other the satisifaction of letting them go and find something or someone who would make them truly happy.

Being married, of course, didn't stop both Lisa and Ryan from having muliple affairs, or dalliances, all of which they thought they were so clever in hiding. But they never counted on how quiet and sneaking their youngest daughter would turn out to be. From a very young age, Charlotte bore the brunt of her parents unhappiness. With two children there might have been a chance to dig themselve out of the hole they had created for themselves, emotionally and financially. But a third made it next to impossible. Luke, already seven years older than his youngest sister, could take care of himself. He was the boy, the "heir" of the family and therefore he missed a lot of the abuse his father rained down on the girls. He belittled them and withheld from them any emotional support they might have needed. Lisa was no better. She cared for Constance slightly more than Felicity because her first daughter was a novelty. By the time Charlotte was born, Lisa didn't need another girl to play with, she already had one. As a result, Charlotte was largely neglected as a child, something school officials tried, in vain, to bring to her parents attention time and time again.

Things would only get worse for Charlotte when Luke left home for college and never looked back. COnstance, a popular girl, and the apple of her mother's eye (no matter how rotten that apple might be) grew to be a vain and mean and by no means a port in the storm that was her parents for her baby sister. Left to her own devices, Charlotte chose to spend her time with a friend she made from school, a friend who would one day grow to be more, who would grow to be everything. But as children, they were simply safe places. Neither talked about the darker parts of their respective lives and neither would do so for many years to come. As children, they didn't need to talk, they needed a place that was quiet and safe. Together they forged a bond she believed would never be broken, and though that would be tested time and time again, she couldn't ever really say it broke beyond repair.

It would be in the midst of young love that Charlotte's father finally did something that would force the family to act. Caught in a compromising situation with the wife of a neighbor, Ryan decided to abruptly pack up his family and leave town, rather than stay and face the music. It was the first time the family's dirty laundry was aired for all the world to see and it was the fact that he got caught that pushed Ryan into a downward spiral of drinking and rage. Luke and Constance were both out of the house, so Ryan's rage fell squarely on his youngest daughter.

The move to a new town was hard for teenage Charlotte. It necessitated a change in schools, which, by high school, is typically a death sentence. But from her first day she realized she could use her new found anonymity and mystery to her advantage. She could redefine who she was. In her old down, she was a quiet girl, friends with few and known by more teachers than students. At her new school she struck out to be known. She spent her mother's money on new clothes, cozied up to the popular girls and did whatever she could to put her past behind her. School became the refuge it never had been, getting her away from the fights between her parents and the abuse they rained down on her because she was an easy target. But changing who she was had its own drawbacks. The more she tried to reinvent herself, the more she saw the things and people from her "old" life slipping away.

Eventually, Charlotte would get out of her parents home and find her way to college at Northeastern University. There she pledged to do better, do more, than either of her parents before her. And for a while, that self-made promise was the thing that made her go. But, whether its nurture or nature, Charlotte slowly began creeping down the same path that her parents had walked. She found herseld drawn to a type of man that had a dark heart, a black soul, the type of man that could only spell out hurt. But she didn't see it coming, didn't care to stop it. And it would be that man that would change everything. Without understanding how, Charlotte had fallen so in love with a man who wouldn't give all of himself to her, that when that man decided to leave her, she broke.

Distraught, Charlotte fell into a deep, dark place and, finding no end to the pain of not being with the man she loved more than anything. With a fistful of pills and a bottle of vodka, she tried to destroy that dark place, forever. She has no memory of what happened after, no memory of her roommate finding her in the middle of their common room, no memory of the ride to the hospital, no memory of having her stomach pumped, no memory of the week she was in a medically induced coma. When she finally came to, she had no true memory of what she did to herself, and guilt forced her to rewrite the memories she did have about the man she loved. She couldn't get right with the fact that she'd fallen so low, she'd tried to kill herself.

Finally, Charlotte got her shit together, graduated from Northeestern and immediately enrolled in grad school. She lives in Boston, still estranged from her parents and her siblings.