Originally published on Story Circle Network‘s Her Stories Substack, in the True Words by Real Women section.
At six years old, I met Shakespeare in my grandmother’s bedroom at 11:47 p.m. on a sweltering Nebraska night. I know the exact time because I’d been staring at her alarm clock for two hours, my stomach churning like a washing machine on spin cycle, my chin doing that pre-cry quiver that kids perfect around kindergarten.
Earlier that day, I’d executed what I considered a brilliant heist. The neighbors across the street had fireworks—real ones, not those pathetic snakes that just turned to ash on the sidewalk. So naturally, I recruited my best friend, Jimmy Robbings (the names have been changed to protect the innocent), for a covert operation. We snuck into their garage like tiny, incompetent ninjas. Jimmy, displaying the loyalty of a weathervane in a tornado, chickened out and bolted. But not me. I channeled my inner cat burglar, crawled up into their loft, and liberated a handful of firecrackers.
Jimmy miraculously recovered his courage when it came time to set them off in the woods behind my house. We had a blast. Literally. Looking back, it’s a small miracle we didn’t burn down half of York, Nebraska.
That night, I was staying at Gaba’s. Her real name was Bernice, but one of us seven grandkids had christened her “Gaba” as a toddler, and it stuck. We lived in a duplex: Gaba on one side, our family of nine sardined on the other. She was the most spiritual person I’ve ever known, which made lying to her feel like lying directly to God’s personal assistant.
“Mary,” she’d asked earlier, in the way of grandmothers who already know the answer, “did you take fireworks from the neighbors?”
“No,” I’d said, achieving a personal record for how quickly a single syllable could make someone feel like garbage.
By 11:47, I couldn’t take it anymore. I dragged myself out of bed and padded to her room, each step feeling like I was walking to my own execution. I woke her up gently, because even in my guilty misery, I wasn’t a complete monster.
“Gaba,” I squeaked through a throat as tight as a pickle jar lid, “I lied. I took the fireworks.”
She sat up, adjusted her glasses, and nodded like she’d been expecting me. Then she did something remarkable. She launched into a plan. Not a lecture, not a guilt trip—a plan.
She found a quarter in her purse (Gaba’s purse contained everything from hard lemon candies to possibly the original recipe for Coca-Cola) and pressed it into my sweaty palm. Tomorrow, she explained, I would march across the street, knock on the neighbors’ door, confess my crime, apologize, and offer the quarter as payment.
The prospect terrified me more than the lying had, but somehow, with the plan in place, I could breathe again. As she tucked me back into bed, she said something that etched itself into the deep recesses of my mind: “To thine own self be true.”
I had no idea what it meant. For all I knew, “thine” was some kind of garden tool. But the words lodged in my brain like a song you can’t stop humming.
The next day, knees knocking like castanets, I did exactly what Gaba prescribed. The neighbors, probably amused by this tiny, terrified confessor clutching a quarter like a lifeline, accepted my apology graciously. They even let me keep the quarter, though I suspect that was less about forgiveness and more about not wanting to take candy money from a six-year-old.
Fast-forward several decades, and here I am, answering endless Q&A interviews for my debut thriller. When asked about Tangled Darkness‘s major theme, I wrote about how buried shame and unresolved trauma can destroy lives, how secrecy erodes relationships, and how recovery is an ongoing practice of radical honesty. I explained how my protagonist, Leslie, a psychiatrist hiding her past, demonstrates that professional success doesn’t inoculate against old patterns under stress — or, let’s face it — under any conditions whatsoever.
As I typed those words, that night in Gaba’s room came flooding back. Because really, what is “to thine own self be true” but the antidote to everything that destroys Leslie in my novel? It’s the radical honesty that recovery demands. It’s the confession that sets you free, even when it terrifies you. It’s the quarter in your palm that says you’re willing to make things right.
I understand now what Gaba knew then: being true to yourself isn’t a destination you reach after some personal enlightenment cruise. It’s a daily navigation, constantly course-correcting, sometimes finding yourself at 11:47 p.m. with your stomach churning because you’ve drifted off-route.
Shakespeare probably didn’t have six-year-old firecracker thieves in mind when he penned those words. But Gaba did. She knew that a child who could wake her up to confess a lie would grow into an adult who could face harsh truths. She was teaching me that the churning stomach and quivering chin were not punishments—they were my internal GPS, recalculating when I’d taken a wrong turn.
I hope Gaba is looking over my shoulder as I write this, maybe chuckling at how her midnight Shakespeare lesson planted seeds that would bloom decades later in a psychological thriller about the cost of keeping secrets. Though knowing Gaba, she probably saw it coming all along. After all, she kept Shakespeare and quarters in reserve for exactly such emergencies.
That quarter could have bought a pile of Bazooka Joe and probably did. But it also bought me a lifetime of knowing when my internal GPS is recalculating—and that’s an exchange rate Gaba would have called a bargain.
