What if the secret you believed was your most awful, shocking, and shameful wasn't truly the worst thing you kept locked deep inside your mind? What if you thought you'd survived the worst thing that could possibly happen to you...and you were wrong?

Joey Bishop has loved Hope Wellman since they were children, but Hope finds it difficult to love anyone else when she is less than fond of herself. Turning 21, she carries a childhood full of horrific memories, a bone-chilling recurring nightmare, and a persistent paranoid sense of being followed that she would rather keep repressed. Is evil reaching from beyond the grave to capture the tattered remnants of her soul once and for all, is it only a machination of her disturbed mind, or is there something happening more sinister than even she can imagine?

Attending the funeral of her abuser is the first step in putting her life back together. She struggles with the facts that she never told anyone what happened to her and that the grave they are mourning over is empty. She'd find it a lot easier to move on and believe in the future if he were in the box, ready to be covered with dirt. She fears the last thread of her sanity has snapped when she sees Lucas everywhere she turns and can't escape a recurring nightmare. Is her tormentor alive, or is she imagining it? Is her dream triggered by past fears, or is it a prediction of the future?

Quoted from Three Rules: "I have learned three rules in my life: 1.) The most dangerous people in the world are not always strangers. 2.) The scariest things imaginable are not those that can kill you, but those you can live through. And probably the most prominent: 3.) The most horrible possibility is not what could happen to you, but what you could become - I became a killer."