10 Minutes - M.L. Case

She came home for a funeral. She wasn’t prepared for the past to be waiting for her.

When a daughter returns home after her mother’s death, she is given 10 Minutes alone before the viewing. In that brief space, the years collapse.

Childhood memories surface alongside the silences, betrayals, and complicated bonds that shaped the woman she became. What begins as a final goodbye becomes a reckoning with a family history that cannot be neatly explained-or erased.

Blending prose and poetry through fragmented flashbacks, 10 Minutes explores the difficult space between loving a parent, confronting painful memories, and finding a measure of peace.

Its intimate storytelling and exploration of grief, family betrayal, and complicated love may appeal to readers of contemporary women’s fiction and emotionally resonant poetry. It also invites meaningful book-club conversations about how love and hurt can coexist, what mourning brings to the surface, and what finding peace can look like when the past remains unresolved.

The poems deepen the journey, giving voice to childhood, grief, estrangement, confrontation, and the difficult work of reclaiming a life from the past.

For readers drawn to literary fiction about complicated mother-daughter relationships, toxic family dynamics, intergenerational trauma, grief, and emotional survival, 10 Minutes is an intimate exploration of what can happen when returning home forces you to see the past without looking away.