AFTERMATH

Some loves don't leave. They linger.

Three years after losing her husband, Nora Calloway does the only thing left to do: she moves. She loads a piano into a truck and drives four hours east into the Tennessee highlands, to a town called Gracewood, with no plan beyond surviving the next season.

Gracewood is the kind of small town that holds its people close. And in Gracewood, something quietly extraordinary is understood: the deeply loved dead don't always leave right away. They linger in yards, in doorways, in the warmth of rooms that should be empty. It is not frightening. It is simply the way of things.

What Nora doesn't expect is Callum Webb, three doors up Sycamore Street, a man who builds furniture from walnut and oak. Things meant to last. He doesn't rush her. He doesn't ask her to be anything other than what she is. He simply stays.

Told across one year in Gracewood; through autumn festivals and winter silences, music written at three in the morning, and the slow, honest work of learning to trust the world again.

Aftermath is a novel about what grows in the place where everything fell.

It is a story about grief that becomes structure. Music that becomes truth. And the specific, terrifying, necessary courage of letting yourself be loved again, not instead of what you lost, but because of it.