Three times in her childhood, somebody set Makhali down on the bank and went back into the dark.

She was three the first time. Cold water took everything she had on one February morning, and what was left of her was carried to a low house at the end of a gravel road, where her grandfather, Ahuna, put her boots on the wrong feet and walked her out into the freezing dark at five in the morning.

He set her on her feet facing east. He let go of her hand. And he said: Stand up. Let it find you.

He was gone before she turned seven.

This is not a story about a girl who was healed. It is about a girl who spent three years with clothespins on her curtain to keep the light out, and who took them down one ordinary Saturday in November in about forty seconds, and walked out into a small dirt yard in town to find out whether the standing had ever belonged to her at all.

Told in her own voice at forty-one, BEFORE THE SUN FOUND HER is the origin of the woman who became a Dream Weaver: an unflinching account of grief, of the aunt she spent twenty-six years misunderstanding, and of the difference between a thing being easy and a thing being small.

Book one of the Dream Weavers Origins series.