Purgatory: A Novel
The Scorched Earth Trilogy – Book One
Grace Kelleway finally escaped the generational trauma that once shaped her entire world—but now it’s coming back for the only people she can’t afford to lose.
Back‑of‑Book Blurb
I walked away from the cycle that made me — the violence, the silence, the people who preferred their lies to my truth. In Bodrum, I built a life quiet enough to breathe. But harm doesn’t stay contained. It travels. It watches. It waits for the moment you stop looking over your shoulder.
I spent years contorting myself to survive. Leaving was the first time I chose myself. Staying gone was the second. But the old inheritance is moving again, threading through the next generation, reaching across oceans with the same quiet precision it once used to keep me compliant.
Some monsters don’t come from the outside. Some sit beside you, scrolling their phone, certain you will stay silent.
I’m thousands of miles away, but they still feel me slipping from their grasp — and they know what it will cost them if I tell the truth.
Choosing myself was never an escape. It was the beginning of the fracture.
Excerpt — Purgatory
Chapter One
Grace
Bodrum, Türkiye
“He’s dead,” my daughter wailed in my ear, thousands of miles away. “Mom, you got what you wanted. My dad is dead.”
I stood in my kitchen staring out across the Aegean Sea and released the breath I had held for over three decades, because the man who abused me was dead, finally.
The first betrayal is complicated. Hearing Mia felt like a blade slicing through flesh and snagging on bone. Condemnation laced every word.
“Mom, happy now.”
Yes, I am.
I bit the words back. What’s the point except to feed her narrative that I was the problem? That I had created the abuse. That I deserved his closed fist landing squarely against my head; my body slammed into the wall, the glass of family photographs shattering around me, cascading onto the floor in fragmented pieces of a life no one knew about.
The ones who knew believed I deserved it.
© C.M. Seybolt
Author’s Note
This novel began as a question about what survives when silence becomes a family’s first language. Purgatory is the story of what rises when someone finally refuses to carry it.
Generational Trauma Exploration
The harm that shaped Grace’s life doesn’t stay contained — it moves through family, friendship, and community, resurfacing in the people who were never meant to carry it
Estrangement and Isolation
Estrangement is the fracture at the center of the story — a separation built from inherited harm and the quiet distance neither woman knows how to close.
The Scorched Earth Trilogy
A trilogy following the long arc of inherited trauma and the quiet, devastating consequences of confronting it.
