We Are the Terwilligers

A missing father. A dying house. A family secret waiting by the river.

When eighty-year-old Thomas Terwilliger disappears from Magnolia Grove Memory Care, his three grown sons are pulled back to Wakefield, the old family home on the James River.

Truman comes to manage the crisis. Tristan comes to outrun his own. Trevor comes because, in the Terwilliger family, someone always has to understand what no one else will say.

But Thomas has not returned to Wakefield alone. With him is Maren "Mare" Thompson, a young woman from California whose mother once knew the Terwilligers and whose presence threatens to unravel everything the family has spent nineteen years refusing to name.

As a storm moves toward the Virginia coast, Wakefield becomes both shelter and witness. In its rooms, the brothers confront their father's decline, their mother's absence, and the hidden choice that altered more than one life. By the time wind and rain break against the house, the Terwilligers will have to decide what can be repaired, what must be mourned, and whether a family can make room for someone it failed before it ever knew her.

Tender, wry, atmospheric, and emotionally gripping, We Are the Terwilligers is a story of brothers, buried letters, old houses, river mud, and the hard grace of telling the truth too late - but not too late for everything.

Adam Carpenter Welles is the author of the novel The Handsome Sailor: A Reimagining of Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor and the short story collection Scars and Voices. He lives with his husband in Honolulu, Hawai'i.