“We can only control our own actions and choices. After that, control passes from our hands. We have to live with the results.” So says an older woman to the young woman protagonist in my story Quiet Deception, my second novel.

The characters, from the young woman, Kim, all the way up to her professors, her supposed role models, make choices and live with the results. They live with sorrow, joy, fear, regret, forgiveness, familial love between husband and wife and father and son, friendship (sometimes when other love is absent), a growing knowledge of God’s love, and ultimate victory, though a bittersweet victory for some.

The time period, from the end of World War II through the 1970’s, is, in a sense, a character also, mirroring the choices of the protagonists. Americans made choices during that time that we live with today.