68 pages • 2 hours read
When She Returned
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Prologue-Chapter 9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of mental illness, child abuse, addiction, graphic violence, illness, physical abuse, and emotional abuse.
Prologue Summary
A woman called Kate Bennett runs through the forest with her baby, Shiloh, who keeps crying. Kate fears that Shiloh’s cries will give away their position to “them,” a group that will take Shiloh to “him.” Kate makes it out of the forest to a gas station, but it is closed. A man named Matt finds her, and she asks him for help.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Abbi”
NOW
Abbi Bennett is 16 years old, and it has been 11 years since her mother disappeared from a store parking lot when Scott Bennett, her father, walks into her bedroom with Meredith, her stepmother. Scott looks like he is having a heart attack. Abbi wonders if something is wrong with Meredith’s sons, Caleb and Thad, but her biggest fear is that her father will be taken from her like her mother was.
Scott tells Abbi that her mother Kate is alive, despite the fact that they had a funeral for her five years ago. Kate has been found somewhere in Montana. Abbi, Scott, and Meredith drive to the hospital in Montana, and, along the way, Abbi thinks about how she never really knew her mother. Abbi was five years old when her mother disappeared, and most of what she knows about Kate she learned from her father.
