These Broken Roads

In this gripping and honest memoir, Jamaican
immigrant Donna Marie Hayes recounts how at the peak of her American success in
New York City, she is scammed and robbed of her life’s savings by the “love of
her life” met on an online dating site and how she vindicates herself to
overcome a lifetime of bad choices.

Donna Hayes had fortitude and smarts. She’d already survived so much. At
the top of her game, thriving in New York City no less, her career was soaring
on Wall Street and she was starring in her own one woman show off Broadway. To
be scammed by a man she had met on a dating app, someone she thought she would
marry, shocked and shamed her. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. In
Jamaica as a child, death had come for Hayes three times. Each time she
survived it and her beloved grandma reminded her that God had her back, that
she was destined for greatness.

Yet, in the
poverty and loneliness of her childhood, it was hard to believe. Every day she
dreamed of going to America and joining her birth family, never understanding
why she had been left behind. When she was 14, her mother finally sent for
her. 

Donna’s
elation was soon offset by the challenges of her new life. 

From her
mother’s strict church to an early marriage, single motherhood, and a second
disastrous and abusive marriage, when Donna finally escaped, she vowed to never
again subject herself to relationships and people who harmed her. And for the
next eight years, she kept that vow. 

Then Hayes met
the man of her dreams, Javier De Leon, on a dating website and they became
inseparable. Before long, their love undeniable, he proposed and tattooed her
initials in large bold letters across his chest. But 18 months and $177,000
later, it all fell apart. Hayes learned that she had been a target from the
beginning, the victim of a romance/real estate scam perpetrated by a career
criminal and ex-con from The Bronx. Suddenly, her financial independence was at
risk and so was her ability to trust herself. 

This is the
story of how that woman rose yet again to find her power, making the scam and
her choice of De Leon the last run along the broken roads of her past.