Tiffany's Recant

What would you do if your lifelong ambition was suddenly taken from you? This was Joshua's dilemma. Joshua Walker's goal in life from the time he was a youngster was to be a great teacher and for five years he was the most popular teacher at the middle school building where he taught language arts. Students were always seeking him out for support and advice and they found him open and accepting. To him, Tiffany was just another 13 year-old-girl who regularly visited his room after school and Joshua thought his room was like a sanctuary for her. His life changed when he realized that she was becoming infatuated with him and that was when he restricted her after-school access to his room. Needless to say, he was surprised when the police visited his school and arrested him on the charge of criminal sexual conduct in the third degree. Over the next few months, he learned that CSC cases are treated differently in court. Not only was he sentenced to jail but he was placed on the registry of sex offenders. His life as he knew it was forever changed.

Following his release from jail, he relocated to Manitou a small town on the northwest shore of Lake Michigan. Starting over can be a challenge particularly when you are a convicted felon and on the sex registry to boot. No longer able to fulfill his life's ambition of being a teacher, Joshua found two part-time jobs that enabled him to support himself, and he also found the welcoming citizens of Manitou helped his adjustment to his new reality. His life in Manitou was improving by the day especially when he met Audrey. The challenge facing him was convincing the young, single mother that he had been falsely convicted.

Just when he thought his life was returning to some sense of normalcy Tiffany came back into his life. The last thing Joshua wanted was for his past history to create problems in his new life but that was what seemed destined to happen. The media was deeply interested in attention-grabbing stories and Joshua's past provided just that. The only way he could get his old life back was to appeal the wrongful conviction and doing that would create a media stir. Getting through the most recent turn of events would take all the courage he could muster along with the loving support of his friends. Did he have it in him to open old wounds and was getting back his old life so important that he'd risk his current life. These are only a few of the questions he had to resolve.