From acclaimed author Terah Shelton Harris comes a poignant story of survival and redemption that questions what it means to stop existing and start living.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Where the Wildflowers Grow by Terah Shelton Harris, which releases on February 17th 2026.
Leigh is the last of the Wildes. She knows this because she watched them all die.
Grief never truly fades and even as the tragedy haunts her, Leigh carries on, because survival is in her blood. So, when the transport bus taking her to prison careens off the road, killing everyone onboard except her, she does what’s in her nature. She survives.
While searching for a place to hide, Leigh stumbles upon an unexpected sanctuary: a flower farm in rural Alabama tucked away from the world. What Leigh doesn’t expect is the found family there who have built something from the wreckage of their own lives. Especially Jackson, the farm’s owner, who sees through Leigh’s defenses, offers her small moments of tenderness, encourages her to face her own tragedies. Slowly, Leigh finds peace with the hard pace and soft nature of the farm, taking comfort in the life blooming around her. Maybe she’s not beyond redemption, not too broken for something good. And maybe, just maybe, Leigh starts to heal.
But the past isn’t so easily buried.
No matter how far she runs, the truth of who she is and the ghosts of the Wildes follow. And when those secrets catch up to her, threatening everything she’s come to love, Leigh will have to truly face what she can survive.
Prologue
I will tell you my story and will leave nothing out. I remember it all. Even the memories I wish to forget. They enter without knocking.
I should probably start at the beginning, but it’s not so easy to find. Beginnings are never where you think they are, where they should be. Especially if you’ve lived two lives and known an in-between. But if I must start, I’ll start here, with the truth. I owe you that much. And so much more.
I was born to the last of the Wildes. There’s no other way to say it. I know because my father told me so. He knew because he watched the others die. He reminded me and my sister, Lila, of that all the time. Terrible thing, to watch someone die, to be the survivor left to tell the story. Maybe that was why he spent his life trying to be something, or someone else. Felt an obligation to keep the bloodline going. Maybe that was why Mama let him be, let us be. Let history repeat itself. With me.
I was twelve when my father first heard the voices. The ancestors, he called them. He carried their world on his shoulders. It’s no wonder he heard their voices too. They whispered all sorts of things to him—instructions, to-do lists, commands—and he listened. Did every one. Rolled the dice thrown at him and bet every dollar given to him. Mama didn’t hear the voices, but she heard Daddy’s—loud. She loved him with an intensity that bordered on worship and would later warp my understanding of love. She carried him on her shoulders and dragged us at her feet. He loved her for it, gave her flowers and fists to prove it.
Mama and Daddy were the first weapons we knew. Not the harsh realities that awaited us outside our tiny trailer in South Carolina. They didn’t know what to do with us, nor did they want to know. They loved us, more or less, but could have as easily hugged us or hurt us, fed us or starved us. They treated us as currency that they traded, spent, and sometimes saved, but only for later. Puppets on their string. It was this tenderness and pain that led to the ruin of my family. “We are survivors,” Daddy often said.
And yet none of them did—survive. Not even Lila, my first love.
She falls in the in-between, the ragged seam stitched along my two lives. This is the hardest part of my story, the murkiest and the darkest. I remember all this, too, but the results take longer to tally. It’s both yesterday and forever ago.
Such are the memories of my life.
But you’re not here for that, for just that. You want the part that contains you. But first, these, too, are the things that matter, that made me. That are why I did what I did. We are, each of us, a product of everything that has happened to us, a tether to the past, and we become what is in our nature to be.
There are two ways to continue to exist: to survive and to live. Part of surviving is knowing how to hold your breath underwater longer than the average person, how to catch a fish without a line, and how to hide in plain sight. Survival is a lifetime of moments, hard stops and starts, strung together, then tested and defeated by fate a thousand times. Surviving is the why of my story. It’s the why of me, my two lives.
But living is a run-on sentence—never-ending, a collection of experiences that strengthen you along the way.
I didn’t know it then, but I do now. My second life taught me this.
There’s much to say about this second life. This one matters as much as the first. It’s the one that healed me after the first one broke me, the one that pushed me to reach into the dirt with my bare hands to dig up and inspect the grief I had buried long before, the one that reconnected my body and spirit to Earth. It’s funny how rain on your face, hands covered in soil, and feet curled in grass can heal you.
Such is the simplicity of life.
The truth is this: I died at the bottom of a ravine in South Carolina and was reborn on a flower farm in rural Alabama. I buried the girl I once was and became the woman I didn’t know I could be. It took a little help; I wasn’t so easy to find.
With sweaty palms, gaps in what I knew, and dirt under my nails, I learned to live. But it wasn’t enough that I found Jackson’s flower farm (or that it found me). I mean to say, place is crucial, but not paramount to all else. Geography can’t fill a blank page inside you if you keep running into yourself along its contour lines. I had to stop and listen, set a place for myself, and then pull up a seat. I learned that grief is, in part, a receipt of love that you hold on to. Proof that love existed and that it endures. Death and life are not opposites; they are the same side of the same coin tossed by the same hand. Death is not always the end, just a fresh set of tomorrows. And I will always be grateful for what my two lives afforded me.
I’m no different from anyone else, so don’t feel sorry for me. It is only now that I acknowledge my life, my destiny, my purpose. We are shaped by those who came before us, even if those molds were broken. But I’ve learned you can hold joy and grief at the same time. Even under the worst conditions, flowers will bloom where they are planted. Love is the why behind every heartbeat, every breath. And there are no crimes, no pain beyond love.
This is an incomplete picture, I know, but it’s a start. There are many roots to my story, and they all run as deep as those out that window.
Like I said, beginnings are hard to find. But endings are impossible, so I’ll let you decide how my story ends.
I will tell you my truth. It’s long overdue, and you should hear it from me. My memories are fragile and clumsy in my hands, so I’ll give them to you to protect. They are small but very precious to me.
Listen.
