When the Hands Let Go

When the Hands Let Go A Novel A devastating and ultimately hopeful story about the boundaries of love, the courage to choose yourself, and the hardest lesson a mother can learn: sometimes saving someone means letting them go. Lena Marshall has built her life around her daughter Cassie—a gifted dancer with a bright future ahead of her. But when a career-ending injury leads to prescription opioids, and opioids lead to heroin, Lena finds herself caught in a nightmare she never saw coming. For three years, she sacrifices everything trying to save Cassie: her marriage, her health, her sanity, and nearly her life. She gives money, makes excuses, and enables at every turn, believing that love should be enough to cure addiction. But love, she discovers, can become its own kind of prison. When Cassie's addiction turns violent and Lena becomes the victim of the daughter she's tried so desperately to save, she faces an impossible choice: continue enabling the person destroying them both, or walk away from the child she loves more than her own life. Set against the backdrop of America's opioid crisis, When the Hands Let Go is a raw, unflinching examination of how addiction devastates families and how recovery sometimes requires the courage to choose yourself. It's a story about the difference between love and enabling, between being a mother and being a martyr, and the terrible mathematics of loss that addiction demands. With profound emotional depth and unflinching honesty, this novel explores the most complex of human relationships and asks the hardest question of all: How do you love someone enough to let them go?