The most important story is the one we tell ourselves

Mayyada al-Rahbani was seven when she sprinted through the date orchards of Dujail while Saddam Hussein executed her family. Her escape made international headlines as she navigated a war zone and found refuge in Kuwait City. Renamed Maya and raised by adoptive North American parents, she spent the next four decades running--from journalists, intimacy, her marriage, and into the anonymity of strangers’ beds.

But everything changes when Maya performs a life-saving abortion on a thirteen-year-old girl. Eager to fuel his presidential ambitions, Texas Governor Wade Callahan targets her for prosecution, reigniting the media firestorm about her past. As her life collides with her ex-husband and the fractured family of her patient, Maya is forced to face everything she has spent a lifetime outrunning.

Mayan Ruins blends psychological complexity, erotic sensuality, and contemporary moral dilemmas into a layered story of personal reckoning. It explores how bodies become battlegrounds, how sex can be both shield and sword, and how the stories we tell ourselves can imprison us--or set us free.