Meredith Shale is the heroine and narrator of the novel. She is a fifteen-year-old girl who was raped by her father just more than three years ago. Her father had been sentenced to serve nine years in jail but has gotten out of jail in three years on good behavior. She had thought that she would be grown and gone by the time he got out of jail. As it stands, however, Meredith's mother seems blind to all of the hurt that Charles has caused her daughter. She had sold their house at the time of Meredith's attack to pay for her husband's lawyer. Now she rents a condo for him in the same complex where she and Meredith live. Although Meredith is not supposed to be alone with her father, her mother does not abide by the court order. Only a few days after her father gets out of jail, Meredith's father tries to rape her again.
This time, however, Meredith is ready for her father. A neighbor who is the police officer who originally arrested Charles has given Meredith two nanny cams to put up in the house so that they can start building a case against Charles. Meredith tapes her father's actions. She also outsmarts her father by tossing the knife that she had been intending to use on her father across the room. When he walks away from her to see what she's thrown, Meredith uses a three-foot tall oaken statue of the Virgin Mary to hit her father from behind. Even though doctors agree she probably didn't hit her father with enough force to make him a quadriplegic, he is paralyzed.
In addition to saving herself and other children from her father's crimes, Meredith's actions have also helped to heal another of her father's victims. Meredith had made friends with Andy, who had been abused by Meredith's father as a young boy. Since that time, Andy sustained an injury that caused him to be paralyzed from the waist down. Doctors believed that Andy would be able to walk again, but so far he has not done so. It is at the same time that Meredith whacks her father with the Madonna statue, causing his paralysis, that Andy's paralysis is healed. Although Meredith had never believed in miracles up to this point, she realizes that she may have just witnessed a miracle orchestrated by God.
