BEFORE I LET YOU GO by USA Today bestselling author Kelly Rimmer is a gripping novel about the rabbit hole of drug addiction and a woman’s fight to save the person closest to her, the one with whom she shared her dreams and nightmares, and a bed amidst a twister of chaos. It’s about a woman’s fight to save her sister.

Lexie Vidler and her boyfriend lead picturesque lives. They are both doctors, respected in their fields, and surrounded by friends and colleagues they can call on for any favor. Yet in this case, the favor is huge. Lexie’s sister Annie, who hasn’t been in her life for the last several years --- a result of their past, and the memories from which they have both tried to run away --- has overdosed on heroin while pregnant and needs to be taken to a hospital to save both herself and her newborn baby.

Annie’s blood pressure is dangerously high, and she needs to detox from heroin, yet is stuck between a rock and a hard place. She is at a great risk of losing her baby for two reasons: if she doesn’t take methadone, her blood pressure will continues to rise, but if she does undergo methadone treatment, children’s services --- which must be notified in cases such as this --- is against pregnant woman taking drugs of any kind, even methadone.

"...a gripping novel about the rabbit hole of drug addiction and a woman’s fight to save the person closest to her..."

Throughout the novel, we read letters written by Annie. In them, she describes her past. After she and Lexie’s father passes away, a religious group steps onto their property one day. With the introduction of Robert, a leader in the sect, everything changes. Their mother soon joins the group that they describe as a cult. Once the girls move into the sect’s private community, they can have no contact with the outside world. They are forced to wear long skirts and their hair in a bun, yet that’s the only rule they break. They braid each other’s hair to keep their sense of identity.

In one harrowing scene, after the girls move into Robert’s house, he tells them they can no longer sleep in the same room together. Shaking with fear, the teenagers at the time turn to their mother, who begs Robert --- despite the reader’s fear that she may remain submissive --- to let the girls stay together. He forces them to go upstairs without allowing them to eat dinner after they refuse his demand to call him father, only to separate them. The girls cry and latch on to one another. Their mother intervenes again, telling Robert that the girls will call him father, and pleads with her eyes for them to agree, which they do. The girls’ only safe harbor is in one another. They are sisters, bonded for better or worse, best friends who know one another like the lines in their hands, lines that will never be broken.

As the story crawls on, we see the way the grown sisters stick up for one another, like they did as girls. Case workers threaten to take Annie’s baby away because of her addiction. Doctors become fed up with her inconsistency and reluctance to undergo methadone treatment. Annie goes back and forth, committed and not. But one thing is for sure: She doesn’t want to lose her baby. She doesn’t want her baby to be abandoned and abused like she was.

Then a solution rises up like smoke; the final picture is a little hazy. Lexie could temporarily take the baby while Annie goes to court, changing the course of her picture-perfect life forever. Now, the question is, will Annie stay on the course of healing or destruction?

BEFORE I LET YOU GO explores the multi-layered consequences of heroin addiction --- the effects it has on family and friends, yourself and, most of all, your children, who come into the world innocently, loving their mother without condition. Children also deserve to be loved unconditionally, and need their parents to be given a chance and to make a change. Most of all, though, this story is about the unbreakable bond between siblings and how, through thick and thin, they are one.