...to tell yourself this also: that if you had been there, you would have kept your kindness, kept your faith, kept your hope alive. That you would not be silent, that you would be strong, resistant. .... But you were not there and this is not your story. I thank the Lord that not everyone is a victim. But I ask forgiveness, too. Because I was there and I know that not every victim is innocent.
The lies we tell ourselves to survive are explored in this fictional autobiography in which a woman, almost the sole survivor in her family, tells her daughter of being shipwrecked, and of then being stranded along with her fellow passengers on an island with a leader intent on stealing the wealth carried by the ship. So intent on doing so that he would kill many of those on the island.