Emory Rose

The antiseptic smell of the hospital room still clung to thirteen-year-old Emory Rose Martinez's memories like a shadow she couldn't shake. Six months had passed since breast cancer stole her mother away, leaving behind a grief so heavy it felt like drowning in slow motion. After her mom passed away her Aunt Nell, the family's adventurous spirit who had spent years teaching English in remote Central American villages, offered to take Emory to Belize for an extended stay, it felt like both an escape and an exile. The small coastal town of Roaring Creek, with its palm-fringed beaches and colorful wooden houses on stilts, couldn't have been more different from their Las Vegas suburb. Here, where the jungle met the Caribbean Sea, the pace of life moved with the tides rather than clocks, and the air itself seemed thick with possibility.

But how do you learn to live again when the most important person in your world is gone? How do you find hope in a place where everything is foreign-the language, the customs, the very rhythm of daily life? For Emory, the answer would come in the most unexpected way: through the laughter of local children who would become her guides, the wisdom of a community that understood loss, and the gradual discovery that healing doesn't mean forgetting-it means learning to carry love forward into whatever comes next.