The Pieces He Left

A daughter returns home to reckon with the father she has spent seven years refusing to speak of, and the truth he left behind for her to find.

Rare Kornfeld hasn't seen her father in seven years, since a confrontation in a diner booth ended their Saturdays for good. Three months ago, she said something to her mother she can't take back either, and neither of them has called since. Now she's going home, to Gales, to face both silences at once.

What follows is not the reunion she expected, or the one she spent seven years bracing against. She sees him again, twice, before she is ready. And she finds a box that holds a version of him she never had access to, one that complicates everything she thought she knew about why he left, and who he became after.

Told with the same restraint its narrator has spent a lifetime perfecting, The Pieces He Left is a quiet, exacting debut novella about the questions we decide not to ask, the people we love without fully knowing, and what it costs to finally go looking for the truth. For readers of Claire Keegan's novellas, Elizabeth Strout, and the family-silence, slow-reveal territory of Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You.