When Deborah Katherine Lovett asked her newly estranged husband where their two-year-old son was and he hissed the word, "Safe," she knew she had stepped into a waking nightmare. In April of 1986, Deborah Katherine Lovett asked for divorce in Los Angeles and found herself in a battle right out of an episode of Dynasty. Her then-husband Joe sent their toddler son, Will, into hiding with relatives and then used every dirty trick money could buy to gain sole custody. But that was only the beginning. Two years later, Deborah's parental rights were terminated and all access to her son was cut off. Betrayed, broken-hearted and believing she would never see him again, Deborah began to write and save letters to Will so that one day he might know his mother and how much she loved him. While she rebuilt her life in Birmingham, Alabama, Deborah always mourned the son who was just beyond her reach. Finally, slowly, when Will was 18, Deborah could legally reach out and began a tenuous relationship that would falter before finally they reconciled a few years later.

Dear Will is more than just love letters to a stolen son. It is the wrenching and honest reflection of a childhood shadowed by anger and family dysfuntion, a life marred by mistakes, and a young woman's desperate fight to hold on to her child when everything and everyone had turned against her. And when that failed her refusal to ever, ever give up. Now remarried, the mother of three more children, active in social and philanthropic causes and appearing to have the life of an ideal southern lady, Deborah realized if this could happen to her, it could happen to anyone. In the U.S. there are more than 350,000 reported parental kidnappings of children in the U.S.

each year--and those are only the reported cases. Her story is a beacon of hope to those still fighting and hoping.