She Can Fly
The true story of Kerry Keyes.
Why just leaving isn’t that simple.
BEFORE ANY OF THIS
Kerry Keyes grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in St. Louis. She was somebody’s daughter. A student. A girl with an ordinary life ahead of her.
What happened next did not happen all at once.
Like many abusive relationships, it began with trust. Then isolation. Manipulation. Fear. By the time leaving became necessary, leaving had also become dangerous.
That is the story She Can Fly tells.
it didn’t start with violence
It started with attention.
With someone who made Kerry feel seen, understood, and loved. The control came later. So did the isolation. The threats. The fear.
By then, the person hurting her had also become the person around whom her life revolved.
This is the part of abuse that can be hardest to understand from the outside.
Why didn’t she just leave?
Because leaving wasn’t a single decision. It meant escaping someone who had systematically narrowed her world, separated her from the people who loved her, and made the consequences of leaving feel more dangerous than staying.
She Can Fly is the story of what happened inside that narrowing world—and how Kerry eventually found her way out.
what came later
Kerry’s spine after being beaten with a baseball bat.
she got out.
Eventually, Kerry left.
Not because leaving suddenly became easy. Not because the fear disappeared. She left while she was still afraid.
And then she began the slow work of building a life that belonged to her again.
She found her family. She built a career caring for other people. She made a home.
She grew older.
She got to have a life after him.
years later, she told me her story
Kerry raised me.
I grew up knowing pieces of what had happened to her. But knowing that something happened and understanding how it happened are different things.
Then she told me.
We sat together for hours, days, months. I listened. She remembered. I asked questions I had never asked before. Then I wrote.
And slowly, the story of a woman I had always known became the story of a girl I had never met.
She Can Fly is that story.
This is Kerry’s story, but it’s not unique
Abuse rarely begins with violence.
It begins with love. Attention. Trust. With someone becoming important enough that losing them feels impossible.
And then, little by little, the world gets smaller.
That is why “just leave” has never been a simple answer.
I wrote She Can Fly because understanding how someone gets trapped may be one of the ways we learn to help them get free.
Kerry got out.
Not everyone does.
Listen before you judge. Believe people when they tell you they are afraid.
And if someone you love is trying to leave, help them fly.
GET THE FULL STORY:
"To every person asking why the abused stays with the abuser, this book may help to gain an understanding. As a preventative tool, it is invaluable."
—Shannon Lastowski, Vine Voice
"Michael G. Gabel has reconstructed a remarkable, terrible, ineffably sad, and ultimately grace-saved life. She Can Fly is a generational meditation on suffering, redemption, and the debts we owe to one another: difficult to read, extraordinary to read, essential to read."
—Joseph Rago, The Wall Street Journal
"She Can Fly is a story that needs to be told - a story of immense bravery and strength from a woman who has been so brutally mistreated.”
—Julia Wiklander, Founder of Girls' Globe