Her own mother called her “useless” and sold her to a rugged mountain man for just $20 and two goats. Temperance, 18 and broken by years of abuse, thought she was being sent to her death. But when she arrived at Obadiah Stone’s isolated cabin, she found something she never expected: a warm meal, a soft bed, and a teacher who would change her destiny.
The transaction was cold, brutal, and final. In the freezing interior of a crooked wooden house in Blackwater, a mother looked at her 18-year-old daughter with eyes devoid of love and made a deal that would make the devil blush. Constance Whitmore, a woman whose bitterness had long ago curdled into cruelty, sold her own flesh and blood—her daughter Temperance—for twenty dollars and two goats.
To Constance and her favored, spiteful daughter Charity, Temperance was nothing but a burden. Constantly berated for her size, called “fat,” “obese,” and “useless,” Temperance had spent her life on her knees, scrubbing floors and absorbing insults that stung worse than the leather strap her mother wielded. She believed the lies. She believed she was worthless.
