Walking Away

Luciana Fiore

Description

My Memoir ‘Walking Away” Unburied Truths of my Murderous Mother…is about the unfolding of family secrets that uncovers a sociopath that stopped at nothing to get what she wanted!
I decided to walk away from my mother when I discovered she murdered my step-father. I was in my 30’s then and shortly before had learned she murdered who I thought was a stranger. I didn’t realize the man she murdered was my biological father until my 50’s. That is only the beginning of what I learned my mother kept from us – my sisters, step-siblings, the police, and me.
My memoir, Walking Away: Unburied Truths of my Murderous Mother, tells the simple and relatable story of a woman falling in love, having two children, supporting her husband, getting divorced and finding my footing. But all of this is tainted by my slow discovery that my mother got away with multiple murders. To call this a “rags to riches” story – I was born in a small town to a loving father but raised by our drunk mother who left him; put myself through college; built my own businesses; and then married a man who eventually pulled in millions – undersells what really happened: that I grappled with raising children because I knew what was in our bloodline; that I had to learn what forgiveness meant in order to ensure my family stayed honest; and that I had to overcome myself in order to live a life without pain.
There are thousands of self-help books that teach people how to handle relationships differently, how to talk and act. But there are not many that explain what it feels like to choose to walk away; to raise your children only knowing that you need to do the opposite of what was done to you; or to struggle to know whether or not to share any of your past with your children. This book is for all the individuals out there that have discovered unsettling realities about their families, and who want to continue to live a beautiful and productive life despite the earth shattering revelations.

Sujets

• Personal Memoirs
• Ácido desoxirribonucleico
• Biography
• Memoir
• Mystery
• Murder
• Autobiography
• DNA

Informations

• Publié par: Balboa Press
• Date de parution: 20 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798765229743
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Walking Away
Unburied Truths of my Murderous Mother
LUCIANA FIORE


Copyright © 2022 Luciana Fiore.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
 
Balboa Press
A Division of Hay House
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Bloomington, IN 47403
www.balboapress.com
844-682-1282
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
ISBN: 979-8-7652-2973-6 (sc)
ISBN: 979-8-7652-2975-0 (hc)
ISBN: 979-8-7652-2974-3 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022910905
 
Balboa Press rev. date: 07/22/2022
Contents

Introduction
 
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
 
Epilogue
Introduction

I lost my mother long before she died. It’s possible that I never had her to begin with—that none of reality ever held her. She died alone in her sixties in a doublewide trailer in a nothing town. She was a grandmother to children who knew her even less than her own children and mistress and master to men her husbands knew whispers of.
But this isn’t her story.
It’s mine.
It has to start with her because I did. And as quickly as we started together, we severed and intertwined and broke apart and meshed again and then exploded. I left the rubble behind, but every now and then, I still find traces of its ashes on my wings.
Chapter 1

“Listen, Jack. You’ve already set me up with a man who moved away and a man who turned out to be a drug addict. And you knew that about both of them before you set me up! Fool me twice, shame on me. I’m not doing it a third time.”
Jack smiled and traced his fingers on his glass. “This guy is different. You’d be great together!”
“That’s what you said last time!” I shook my head as I smoothed my cloth napkin on my lap.
Jack’s wife set her fork down and looked at me over the candle. The restaurant we were in was dimly lit, with maroon tablecloths, water goblets, and sturdy dishes. “Luciana, you don’t have to marry him, but is it really going to hurt you to go on one date?” she asked.
They were relentless.
I pursed my lips and pushed an arugula leaf around with my fork. “You guys know I’m really busy right now,” I said solemnly. I looked up at Jack.
Jack tilted his head, and his eyes softened. “You’re always busy, Luciana. That’s never going to change about you. But not everyone is going to do to you what Kyle did.”
I scoffed and looked at my salad.

Kyle and I met when I was working on a cruise ship a few years prior. He and I worked on the same crew, and he was smart and funny but serious. I was good friends with his fiancée Helen. We often spent our evenings together, and Kyle would come with. We would talk and joke about the people on the cruise, making up code names for them and watching the drama unfold. When I got off the ship and started working for a top designer, Kyle, Helen, and I stayed in touch. We set a regular coffee date for every other Saturday.
Helen had gone on the cruise ship after finishing college. She wanted an adventure before she started teaching middle-school history. Kyle had been working at a retail store and needed a break, so he went with his girlfriend to the ship when she graduated. When we were done traveling, Helen started teaching, and Kyle got a job doing bookkeeping at the same retail store he had worked at before.
I liked working for the designer, but it had been a while, and I knew I wanted to do something different. I talked to Kyle and Helen about wanting to open up a shop one day over coffee, and it dawned on me that Kyle would be a great fit. He could take care of the daily accounting, since he had experience, and I would be the creative partner. I also knew how to bake and figured we could open at 7:00 a.m. and serve espresso drinks and desserts, since they were popular back then, and it was a great way for a dessert shop to make extra cash.
When I floated the idea to Kyle and Helen, Kyle jumped on it! I was so excited to get started with my friend. I knew for sure it would be a great partnership.
I started with seven different cheesecakes and pastries. During the first winter, when sales dropped off, I started going out and opening wholesale accounts to restaurants, coffee shops, and cafeterias inside major computer companies in Northern California. Our business exploded! But somehow, we weren’t making that much more.
I became friends with a man named Sam at the gym. He worked in finance, so I asked him if he would take a look at our books, since it had been a few months of being incredibly busy but not making as much as I thought we would. I knew there was some math we didn’t have right because we weren’t making enough for the amount of work we were doing—there had to be somewhere we could trim the excess that we just hadn’t thought of yet.
After a month of tracking orders with paid receipts, he found out that Kyle wasn’t depositing the cash that came in. When I confronted him, he denied it. The next day he didn’t show up to work. When I tried calling him, he didn’t answer. The day after that, when he didn’t show up again, I called Helen. She sounded like a mess. She told me that Kyle had called off the engagement and left town with no explanation. I knew what the reason was, but I kept it to myself; she didn’t need any more to deal with than what she already had on her plate.
After he left, I went into full gear and worked my butt off. I hired another baker and some college girls to help in the store and prepping products. I was opening new accounts all over California. Then I opened up a chain of breakfast and lunch restaurants that had orders delivered every other day. The bigger the business got, the less I slept.
I had an incredible team behind me though. Somehow, losing Kyle was one of the best things that happened to me. Those young ladies and I turned into a wonderful family. I was in an area where a lot of parents made their children get jobs even though they didn’t need them, so I tried to hire the girls who really did need to work—whether they were saving up for college or already attending. We worked like a well-oiled machine, and I never felt uncomfortable leaving the shop to go out for a meeting with a future or current client.
But I wasn’t ready to hand it all the way over to them. I just kept pushing as hard as I could to keep the business going and growing. With the responsibility of young people under me, I knew I had to keep things floating so that they would get paid. It was like they knew I was doing it for them because they stepped up in every way imaginable.
Because things were going so well, my business attorney suggested that I open more stores and franchise them. I loved the idea—people had been asking to franchise the stores as soon as they had opened. Knowing I had investors, I was able to quickly put together a business plan, and I raised half a million dollars to get the first two open.

“Maybe I would believe you if I wasn’t in the middle of all this bullshit,” I told Jack.
Jack’s wife reached out for my hand. “What’s the last you heard?”
“My attorney found him—you know that part, right?” I took a drink of water.
They nodded.
“He’s hired some hot-shot attorney who’s making it practically impossible to sever the partnership, even though he hasn’t been around for months. I even offered to change the name!” I shook my head and looked at my salad again.
“That’s crap,” Jack said. His wife let go of my hand as soon as she saw me crack a smile.
“Yeah,” I nodded. “It’s total crap. And Helen is the worst part of it all.”
“What do you mean?” Jack’s wife asked.
I bit my lip and shook my head. “She found out what happened between us—”
“What happened between you?” Jack asked.
“All this financial shit.”
“She didn’t know?” Jack asked, furrowing his eyebrows.
“No,” I said, moving a tomato around and watching the seeds spread along the plate. “It just seemed like she had enough going on. She didn’t really need more. And . . .” I set my fork down and chewed the side of my lip. I told Jack and his wife the hardest truth of all. “I loved Kyle like a brother. I really believed I could trust and depend on him. Even though I’m so mad at him that I could explode, I couldn’t make it worse for Helen.”
They nodded. I couldn’t tell if their eyes were full of empathy or pity for how crushed I was obviously feeling.
“So I’m not re