Possessions: A Novel

He answered the call. Now he must face everything he missed.Lew Sanders is sitting in a barber's chair when his phone starts buzzing. Six missed calls. Two voicemails. Four desperate texts. By the time he answers, his brother Dean is already gone, dead by suicide before his thirtieth birthday, leaving behind a stunned family and a silence that no one knows how to fill.In the wake of Dean's death, Lew is pulled back into his fractured family and the complicated gravity of their shared past. Moving between the raw aftermath and the formative years that shaped them, Possessions traces the arc of two brothers who were once inseparable: roughhousing in Georgia backyards, inventing games to pass the time, surviving the quiet upheaval of their parents' divorce. But as they grew older, that closeness eroded. Dean became volatile, restless, and increasingly unknowable. Lew retreated into careful observation, mistaking proximity for understanding. Now, as fragments of memory resurface, Lew is forced to confront the distance that grew between them and the unsettling possibility that the version of Dean he carries may be more construction than truth.Set in the contemporary Deep South, Possessions is a sharp, emotionally precise novel about the fragile architecture of memory, the limits of what families can truly know about one another, and the quiet, devastating ways men are taught to carry pain in silence. How well can you really know someone you love if you never learned to ask the right questions?