"A slow-burn unraveling that trusts its reader completely. Osei writes disappearance as a kind of grief no one will name."
— The Sunday Ledger"I read the last hundred pages in one sitting and immediately started the book again from page one."
— Marguerite Fahn, author of The Quiet Ward"Genuinely unsettling without a single false scare. This is what literary suspense should feel like."
— Kirkus Reviews (starred)The first time, she told the officer she'd been in the kitchen the whole afternoon, and she believed it as she said it. It was only later, standing in the doorway of a room she didn't recognize, four miles from home, that the afternoon came apart in her hands like wet paper.
They logged it as a wellness check. No signs of forced entry, no signs of distress, no memory of the six hours in between. Her husband said she'd seemed tired that week. She had not felt tired. She had felt, if anything, unusually present — the kind of present that later made the absence feel like a theft.
It would happen eight more times before she stopped reporting it. By then she had learned the only thing worse than disappearing was being found and disbelieved.
© 2026 Renata Osei · Published by Fieldstone Press