When Wanda Broach-Butts and her husband Ted were asked to take in a foster child-a 14-year-old named Aaron, being held in jail on shoplifting charges-they were ambivalent about saying yes. They had already raised four foster youth and had given back as much as they could. They wanted to enjoy each other in retirement with no distractions, perhaps even live out their dream of relocating to a Caribbean island.

But if they didn’t accept the teenager into their home, the agency said there was a good chance no one would, so Wanda and Ted said yes. They were told little about Aaron’s family history, but that had been the case with every young person they took in. They saw hints of the past in their habits and behaviors-just the tip of the iceberg, without really knowing what lay beneath. Yet this had never been a concern before, and besides, Aaron would be their last foster child.

The Ice Underneath is an unsparing account of Wanda’s passage through an unfathomable tragedy that tested, to the breaking point, her profound Christian faith. With introspective courage, she relentlessly examined and questioned what she thought she believed about herself and found strength in her family’s complex history of loss and redemption. This memoir is a testament not only to our capacity to endure the unimaginable, but to emerge from it with greater resilience and spiritual fortitude than we thought possible.