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hand drawn gaslight sketch
A Lie Twenty-Seven Years in the Making.
A Truth That Changes Everything.
❧ ⁘ ❧
Before She Knew · A Novel

Bria Dean is twenty-seven, running a small design business in New Orleans' French Quarter, and quietly in love with a man she knows she shouldn't be. Then her mother dies — and Bria inherits not just grief, but a secret carried for twenty-seven years: the father she was told was dead never died at all. He simply never knew she existed.

Set against the heat and beauty of the French Quarter, Before She Knew follows Bria through the year after — tracing what her mother hid, and why — as she decides what she wants from the truth: justice, connection, or simply the right to know her own name.

The Playlist Which Character Are You? The House Character Profiles The Query Tracker Before She Knew: Women Meet the Author
This is a work of fiction. While it draws on real places, real emotional truths, and pieces of lives I've witnessed, the characters themselves are composites — imagined people shaped by imagined circumstances. Any resemblance to any one person, living or dead, is not intended as a portrait of them.
A note on process: I use AI in my writing the way I use any tool — the same way I'd use Illustrator or InDesign in my design work. It's not a ghostwriter. It drafts real prose from my direction, and I steer it the whole time, correcting it when it drifts from a character's voice, rewriting until it sounds like the book I meant to write. The story, the truth, the architecture of what happens and why — that's mine. AI is a tool in the process. Never the author.

Before She Knew · Women

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Every woman has a “before she knew” moment. The day everything shifted. The secret you didn’t know was a secret. The truth that changed everything.

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Anonymous stories are shared without your name. BSK Women are named features celebrating real women and their journeys — including their businesses. You choose.

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From the Readers

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“This website and the storyline are simply bedazzling!! Looking forward to celebrating your success with you!!!”

— Marie

“I enjoyed reading your debut! It had a great emotional core and an engaging storyline of family discovery. And I loved how well I got to know each of the characters.”

— Alison

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— Cathy Lankford

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The She Knew Series

How We Got Here

Book One · Before She Knew
A lie twenty-seven years in the making. The father she was told was dead never died at all.
Book Two · After She Knew
Meeting the father she never got to know — and the brother who was raised in the life she should have had.
Book Three · While She Knew
Love in the messy middle, while an old family wound is still finding its way to the surface.
Book Four · What She Knows
A wedding, a birth certificate that won't come easy, and the year Bria finally becomes fully herself.
Book Five
Motherhood cracks her open in ways grief never could.
Book Six · She Goes
Two centuries. One bloodline. The ancestor whose survival made Bria possible.

For Immediate Release

Debut Novelist B.G. Topping Announces Before She Knew, a Story of Family Secrets Rooted in New Orleans

COLUMBUS, GA — B.G. Topping, a graphic designer and lifelong storyteller with roots stretching from the American South to the Scottish Highlands, has completed her debut novel, Before She Knew — the first installment in a planned five-book series.

Set against the heat and beauty of New Orleans' French Quarter, Before She Knew follows Bria Dean, twenty-seven, in the year after her mother's sudden death — when a DNA test reveals the father she was told had died had, in fact, been alive her entire life. It is a story about the lies we tell to protect the people we love, and the truths that outlive us anyway.

"Some secrets outlive the people who kept them."

Topping, who writes under the pen name B.G. Topping, draws on her own family's story for the emotional foundation of the novel. She lives in Columbus, Georgia, with her husband and daughter.

Before She Knew is currently on submission with literary agents — and generating early interest. As of July 2026, the manuscript has received requests for pages from two literary agencies. Updates on publication will be shared first here at bgtopping.com.

Media & Press Inquiries — BGTdesignservices@gmail.com