My Gaurdian Angel

When six-year-old Emily Hartwell is too afraid of the dark to sleep, her mother offers a simple comfort: everyone has a guardian angel, and all you have to do is ask. Emily names hers Michael, after the archangel in her church’s stained glass window, and for the first time, the shapes at the edge of her vision go still.The comfort follows her into a childhood marked by cruelty. Emily is shy, an easy target, and when a boy at school makes her life unbearable, she does the only thing that has ever made her feel safe: she asks Michael for help. The next day, he isn’t at school. He never bothers her again.It happens again. And again. Every classmate who mocks her, every teacher who humiliates her, every rival who makes her small - each one meets an accident, an illness, a tragedy too precise to be coincidence. Emily tells herself it’s protection. She tells herself it’s justice. She keeps asking.But by the time she reaches high school, the pattern has outgrown her control. People who were never cruel to her start paying the price simply for being near her. A face appears in the mirror one night - beautiful, symmetrical, and utterly wrong - and Emily begins to understand that what she invited into her life as a frightened child was never an angel at all.With the help of a therapist who refuses to dismiss what she’s seen and a priest willing to name the thing she’s too afraid to name herself, Emily fights to break free from an entity that has spent a decade convincing her it was the only one who ever truly protected her. The battle costs her friendships, her sense of self, and, for one unbearable night, her innocence - before she finally confronts it directly and walks away believing she has won.Years later, married with two children of her own, Emily has built the ordinary, peaceful life she once thought impossible. Then her seven-year-old daughter mentions a new friend who visits her at night. A friend who says his name is Michael.My Guardian Angel is a haunting novel about the terrible cost of being believed, the fragile line between protection and possession, and how far a mother’s love will go to keep her children from inheriting a war she thought she’d already won.