Emma & Grace

Content Note: This post discusses domestic abuse, coercion, and wrongful conviction. Please take care of yourself while reading.

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The Heart Behind Emma’s Story

When people ask me where Emma Carter came from, the answer is both simple and complicated: She’s real. And she’s not.

Emma is a blend of people I’ve known, loved, and watched struggle. She’s partly me. She’s partly someone else who lived through something unimaginable and came out the other side forever changed. And she’s every person who’s ever been judged before all the facts were in.

My Story in Emma’s Voice

The abuse Emma endures from Zack? That’s mine. Those flashbacks, the manipulation, the way he twists everything until she questions her own reality—I lived that. Many of the scenes between Emma and Zack throughout the book are pulled directly from my own experiences with an ex. I know what it feels like to walk on eggshells in your own home, to deflect with humor because it’s safer than showing fear, to wonder if you’re actually the problem.

Writing those scenes was both painful and cathartic. Every time Emma stood up to Zack, every time she chose herself, I was rewriting my own story the way I wish it had gone. Emma gets to be strong in ways I wasn’t ready to be yet. She gets to say the things I kept silent.

The Story I Couldn’t Tell Alone

But Emma’s journey through the justice system, her time in prison, her daughter Grace’s injuries…that story belongs to someone else. Someone I care about deeply. Someone who lived through a nightmare and came out the other side painted as a monster.

I watched from the outside as this person’s life imploded. I saw the media coverage, the community outrage, the way people who’d never met them decided who they were based on headlines and whispers. I saw someone I knew to be human—flawed, yes, but human—become a villain in a story where the truth was far more complicated than anyone wanted to admit.

This person went to prison for something that happened in a split second. An accident. The kind of moment that could happen to anyone, but didn’t. It happened to them. And they paid for it. They’re still paying for it.

I can’t tell you who they are. They’ve fought hard to rebuild some semblance of privacy after having their worst moment broadcast for public consumption. But I can tell you this: I know what it’s like to be judged. Maybe not on the same scale, maybe not for the same reasons, but I understand what it feels like when people decide who you are based on fragments of your story. When your worst moments define you in others’ eyes, whether it’s an abusive relationship or a tragic accident.

Why I Wrote This Book

Wish Upon a Sunset is my attempt to do something I couldn’t do in real life: show the other side. The human side.

In the media coverage, there was only one narrative: Monster hurts child. Case closed. But life is never that simple, is it? The justice system isn’t always just. Accidents happen. Good people make mistakes. And sometimes, someone pays the price for circumstances far beyond their control.

I wanted readers to walk in Emma’s shoes. To feel her guilt, her shame, her desperate hope for redemption. To understand that wearing an orange jumpsuit doesn’t erase your humanity. That being convicted doesn’t automatically mean you’re guilty. Not in the way people think, anyway.

This book is my way of saying: Look closer. Ask more questions. Remember there’s a real person behind the headlines.

The Truth About Judgment

Here’s what I learned watching someone I care about go through this. We’re all one bad moment away from having our lives defined by our worst mistake. We’re all vulnerable to the court of public opinion, where there’s no presumption of innocence, no chance to tell your side.

The community in Emma’s story—the judgmental stares, the whispered conversations that stop when she walks by, the way people cross the street to avoid her—that’s all real. That happened. I watched it happen.

And I watched someone keep going anyway. Keep trying. Keep hoping that eventually, people would see them as more than the worst thing that ever happened to them.

That’s where Emma’s strength comes from. The resilience to survive abuse and leave? That’s mine. The resilience to survive public judgment and keep going? That belongs to someone else. The combination (the ability to rebuild your life when everything has been stripped away, to keep fighting when everyone has written you off) that’s both of us. That’s what happens when two different kinds of survival meet on the page.

Why This Matters

I’m not asking you to decide if Emma—or the person she’s based on—is innocent or guilty. That’s not the point. The point is that they’re human. Complicated, flawed, struggling, human.

The point is that our justice system isn’t perfect. That sometimes people go to prison for accidents. That sometimes the full story never makes it into the courtroom. That sometimes, the person everyone calls a monster is just someone who had the worst day of their life and never got the chance to recover.

I wrote this book because I needed to tell a story that wasn’t being told. Because someone I care about deserved to have their humanity acknowledged, even if I couldn’t use their real name. Because I’ve lived through abuse and I’ve watched someone live through false conviction, and both experiences taught me the same lesson:

We’re all more than the worst thing that’s ever happened to us. We’re all more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.

Emma Carter is fiction, yes. But the pain is real. The injustice is real. The hope for redemption is real.

And if this story makes even one person pause before judging someone else’s worst moment, then it was worth writing.

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Some details have been changed to protect the privacy of real people, but the emotional truth remains intact. This is a story about second chances, about looking beyond the surface, about remembering that every “criminal” was once just a person having the worst day of their life.

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