The People Who Walked Inside Me

Wren Calder has spent twelve years sitting with the dying so no one has to face it alone. What she has never told a single living soul is what happens afterward.She calls them her walkers: fragments of the people she sits with, a gesture that was never hers, a fear she never earned, an unfinished piece of someone else's life quietly moving in and settling into her chest. She has never let herself ask whether they are real. She has simply learned to carry them, quietly, and let them go.Then an elderly woman named Edith Marsh requests her by name, and the careful, precise way she asks about family tells Wren, immediately, that this case is going to be different.It is. Edith dies holding a memory that does not belong to any client Wren has ever carried before, a specific, impossible detail she has absolutely no way of actually knowing. It should mean nothing. Instead, it unravels a story Wren has believed, completely, for twenty five years, the story of exactly how her own mother died.What follows is not a search for a killer, and not a conspiracy waiting to be exposed. It is something harder: a woman who has spent her entire adult life defined by proximity to other people's endings, finally forced to investigate the one beginning she has never once let herself properly examine, her own. Every answer costs her something. Every mile closer to the truth asks the same unbearable question: if you have spent your whole life being the road other people's grief walks through, can you ever actually become someone with a destination of your own?