Dear Yesterday

A granddaughter. A grandmother. A silence between them that's lasted too long.

Seven. That's how old Luella McCrae was when her mother abandoned her, leaving her in the driveway of her grandparents' foster home. There, she grew up among the other foster children, resenting every day that her mother never came back for her. She left the farm the day she turned eighteen—her sights set on a life in the city.

Eleven years later, she's still struggling to make a name for herself as a writer in At...