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 #12 from NO SECRET SO CLOSE:

I don’t think I’ll ever stop replaying that day in my mind. As if I could somehow make it come out differently.  Makes no sense, of course, but I couldn’t stop the endless spooling of memory. If I could, I’d have to let go, I guess of wishing I could have prevented it.

I paid the toll and entered the 405 freeway headed for home looking down at the speedometer, I saw I was going too fast.  I’d stayed longer than I wanted to at my aunt’s house, and it was getting late now. The weekend with her had helped clear my head as it always did. Lately I’d been too busy to think. Only one semester away from receiving my undergraduate degree, I was already two semesters into my graduate program. That’s just the way things were: Up at five a.m. to train clients at the gym three days a week, followed by a rushed car ride to school the five jumpers I was training before it was too dark to ride, then a quick run down to the lake and back home by nine p.m. The other two days were back-to-back classes.

My days and weeks seemed to blur together. Going to see my aunt was a respite from the craziness I always found myself in. One thing I could always count on Bonnie to do, was slow me down. As a psychotherapist; that’s what she did. I thought of that now, as I eased up on the gas. Yet I was anxious to get home, get unpacked, and lay out my riding clothes for the next day. A few days off had given me time to decide exactly what jumps I wanted to school the horses over. I had envisioned a new course with lots of technical challenges to really test them. Planning to get up early and build it the next morning, I went over it in my mind in detail as I drove.

An hour later, I steered the car over the winding roads leading up toward Lake Wohlford. The fog had rolled in, making the place feel even stranger than it usually did. To be honest, Valley Center had never really felt safe to me. It had a strange energy about it. It was the kind of place that collected drifters, derelicts, and runaways hiding around the lake and up in the hills. The brush, like the fog, collected so thickly, it could hide anything. Plenty of people in this area had told of rumors of lost animals, and even lost souls, in that brush.

The first time I ever made the drive up toward Lake Wohlford to look at the property with my mother, it was a bright sunny day, and the place immediately intrigued me. The sparkling blue water of the lake and small bit of sand stretching out in front of the Lake Wohlford Café felt incredibly inviting. It had always been my dad who brought the family to places like this, the one thought young kids should do things like hike Mt. Whitney, California’s tallest peak. He would like it here, I thought to myself. Yet that rustic appeal could turn on a dime. My neighbor, who’d grown up here, swore he had seen a black panther that had escaped from the San Diego Wild Animal Park, just three miles away. I never bothered to check for myself whether the story was actually true. I wanted to like it here. But I couldn’t shake my wariness. Going running in the evening, I sometimes had the sense that something was about to jump out at me. I’d notice myself running faster and faster, as the light faded.

Turning down the bumpy driveway to our house now, the fog was so thick I couldn’t see the horses in the pens on either side, or much in front of me, for that matter. The mist seemed to envelop the oak branches stretching out over the house like a canopy. The house was actually built on top of an old brick barn foundation with narrow arched stalls. Even before moving there, my mother and I had fantasized about a house built on top of a barn, envisioning a walkway over the stalls with trap doors to drop feed down to the horses. If we had mares foaling, we wouldn’t even have to go outside to check on them! And they’d be warm, because the insulation from the house would keep the barn warm, too. How economical, we thought. Hell, we could save money, and feed the horses in our pajamas.