nona wolfe.

“Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience—or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope."

Brandon and Claire Wolfe were seventeen and nineteen when their first child arrived. By the time Sloane was born three years later, they were already fraying at the seams. The middle child, bracketed by a brother older and two siblings younger, Sloane learned early that silence meant survival. Her house was a chorus of yelling and slammed doors, bills stacked higher than dishes in the sink.

She was an observer before anything else. Teachers called her bright, promising, but noted her tendency to drift—eyes out the window, poems inked into the margins of her homework. She never invited friends home. She stayed late at school or walked the neighborhood until dark, anything to avoid crossing her own threshold. Empathy came naturally, but so did distance. She could hold anyone’s secrets and still keep her own locked tight.

“I was quiet, but I was not blind.”

Her parents leaned on her when it suited them. Claire treated her like a confidant, confessing debts, regrets, the ache of a marriage that felt like a cage. Brandon offered little more than silence and sharp edges—except for the day he handed her the keys to a vintage Mustang on her sixteenth birthday. It was the only proof she ever had of his love, a gift she kept polished and running long after everything else between them broke down.

At eighteen, she packed a duffel bag and left. No tearful goodbye, no forwarding address. She drove until Rhode Island felt far enough and enrolled at the university, majoring in literature because words had always been her only constant.

“Angry people are not always wise.”

It was there she fell in love for the first time—the kind of love that swept her under so quickly she mistook control for devotion. Adoration soured into suspicion, then into locked phones, broken glass, and bruises carefully hidden beneath concealer.

She told herself it was love. For seven years, she told herself that. Until her twenty-fifth birthday, when a vase shattered against her arm and left her with six stitches and no more excuses. At the hospital, a nurse asked quietly, did someone do this to you, sweetheart?—and the truth split her wide open. Her older brother was the only one she called. He came without hesitation, packed her things, drove her away while her boyfriend was at work.

“There is no charm equal to independence.” — Emma

He wanted her to stay. To rebuild, to stitch herself back into the family fabric. But she couldn’t. Too much distance. Too much history.

Nona found Riverbook by accident and she took off, like she was good at doing, finding her own apartment, her own silence, her own freedom.

Her students call her intimidating.

Her friends call her Nona.