The Books
The Scarred Systems series
The Fourth Floor
Scarred Systems, Book One. Available now.
The Fourth Floor is a searing, intimate novel about surviving inside the systems that consume women: marriage, medicine, motherhood, and the state. It follows what it costs to finally walk away.
LeighAnne Rhodes is a veteran Florida Special Agent and a mother of four who has learned to endure. After a catastrophic childbirth ends in an emergency hysterectomy, she is sent back to work before her body or mind has healed. Her short-term disability claim is denied and her pain is minimized, and her identity fractures between who she was and who the world still demands she be.
At home, her marriage is quietly unraveling. Her husband's emotional withdrawal, secrecy, and repeated betrayals collide with her declining mental health, which brings panic, memory loss, and a deep erosion of self-trust. As she investigates crimes rooted in deception and control, she begins to see the same patterns in her own life. Her husband hoards information and calls it privacy, uses love as leverage, and punishes with silence.
When LeighAnne is paired with a brilliant, perceptive new partner whose attention unsettles her, her professional competence returns and shows her how much of herself she has been suppressing to survive. Clarity comes at a cost. As her personal life reaches a breaking point, she must make impossible decisions about her marriage, her children's custody, and her own identity, and she has to choose between staying intact for others and dismantling her life to save herself.
The novel ends with a quiet, devastating reckoning. LeighAnne files for divorce and gives up custody of her children to protect their stability, and she steps into a future that she defines for herself. What remains is the truth of a woman who is alive and finally choosing herself.
Unflinching and emotionally precise, The Fourth Floor takes on maternal mortality, emotional abuse, institutional neglect, and the psychological cost of being "strong" for too long. It tells the story of what happens when endurance stops being noble and survival demands transformation.
The hardcover is $29.99 and the paperback is $17.99. A large print edition is available at Barnes & Noble.
Buy The Fourth FloorIf you would like a sample first, you can read an excerpt.
