NO SECRET SO CLOSE is the story of a the most unthinkable betrayal humanly possible — at only 24 years old, Claire Dorotik’s father has been murdered, her mother arrested, and now, in a sinister twist of fate, Claire’s mother points the finger at Claire, accusing her of killing her own father. Battling the feelings of loss, abandonment, terror, and dissociation, and also learning about them, Claire struggles to stay in her master’s program for psychotherapy. However, when Claire’s brothers also betray her and side with her mother, Claire is left all alone to care for the 18 horses she and her mother owned. As the story unfolds, what is revealed is the horses’ amazing capacity for empathy in the face of human trauma, and the almost psychic ability to provide the author with what had been taken from her. Arising from these horrifying circumstances, the most unthinkable heroes — the horses — show Claire that life is still worth living.

Excerpt #33 from NO SECRET SO CLOSE:

And we were different, he and I. My dad had been a high school football star in Texas at a time when injuries like dislocated shoulders were not a reason to stop playing. You just get back in the game. Running track in high school, a scratched cornea and a patch over my eye were not reason for me to miss practice either. I had no depth perception and would have to live with the name “Cyclops” that my teammates chided me with for years after, but you just get back in the game.

The name never mattered to me; I was the one with a dad who never missed a meet. The horses were my mother’s thing, but this was his. And he had high hopes for me. He’d check the paper every Sunday to see my state rankings. I was getting close, too.  We’d both started watching the top ranked 400m high school female. “That Rachel Parish has got nothing on you,” he’d say. She was at 56.1 seconds, and he had clocked me at 56 flat in a relay. I told him that was a “clocker aided” time — the error of a proud father — but he insisted it was accurate. Actually, I should never have doubted him — he was meticulous in everything he did.

I guess that’s what growing up the youngest son of immigrant parents in Texas will do to a person. He never stopped proving himself. No one expected him to go to college, and he got a Masters in engineering. They never expected him to leave Texas, even castigated him for it, but he moved out to Los Angeles. I guess I was proving myself, too, when one of my mother’s horses slipped and fell breaking my foot and shattering my ankle just six weeks before a major show, and I rode with the cast on. She insisted that they horses were ready, and didn’t need to prepare for the show. But showing up without preparing was not something my dad, or I, did.