“Get out of the car right now,” my mother ordered while rain hammered the highway and my three-day-old twins cried in their car seats, and when I begged her to stop because the babies were newborns, my father grabbed my hair and pushed me out onto the road while the car was still moving…

My name is Abigail Foster, and the night my parents abandoned me on the side of a storm soaked highway with my three day old twins was the moment my life split into two completely different timelines, one where I was still the obedient daughter who believed family meant safety, and another where I learned that sometimes the people who share your blood can become strangers faster than anyone else in the world.

Even now, many years later, I can still remember every detail of that drive home from the hospital as clearly as if it were unfolding again in front of me, because trauma has a cruel ability to preserve moments with terrifying precision inside a person’s memory. The rain had begun as a gentle drizzle when we left Riverbend Regional Hospital outside the city of Cedar Ridge, Ohio, and at first it felt like an ordinary gloomy afternoon that did not seem worth worrying about.