The moment she felt her consciousness seeping back inside her, she knew where she was. She didn't have to look. Or listen. No one had to come whisper in her ear. She could smell it that far out, returning... When sixteen-year-old Connelly Pierce wakes up inside an unknown psychiatric hospital, with both her wrists slashed, she begins the arduous task of piecing together the events of her life that led her there. Her own cognitive behavioral therapy (as she had learned so well from them). Starting with the sudden death of her mother and father when she was six, and the only world she knew disappeared, literally, overnight. That's when, with no known or, at least, close relatives, she and her nine-year-old brother Eric find themselves cast into the nightmare quagmire of government child protection agencies, and Connelly begins her incredible, fourteen-year journey--her odyssey--into her own brave new world. A world, she realizes, she must not only quickly adapt, but fight back as well, if she hopes to survive. Book One of the BEAUTIFUL-UGLY TRILOGY.