THE EXTRA PLACE SETTING: A QUIET CHRISTMAS STORY OF BLENDED FAMILY AND GRIEF BECOMING

For Whoever Is Missing On the first night of their first Christmas together, eleven-year-old Desmond counts the people in the house and then counts the chairs. Five people. Six chairs. He sets an extra place without asking anyone's permission. "For whoever is missing," he says. No one takes the plate away. Over the next four days, objects appear beside the empty setting: a faded photograph, a stained recipe card in a dead woman's handwriting, a cracked glass ornament wrapped in tissue. No one claims them. No one discusses them. In a mid-sized Ohio suburb, a newly blended family learns that Christmas runs on a single engine-gratitude-and that grief, in that arithmetic, looks like ingratitude. What they discover, slowly and without ceremony, is that the missing person was never one ghost. It was all of them: the mother who used to laugh louder, the stepfather who once took up space without apology, the boy who thought his family was unbreakable, the girl who had her own room. The chair is not a tomb. It is a container-for the selves they left behind when two families became one. Warm without false cheer, this quiet novella is about the families patched together by marriage, loss, and second chances. It is about the permission to miss who you used to be while still loving who you are becoming. And it is about the smallest, hardest ritual of the season: setting a place, folding a napkin, and letting the table be large enough for both the living and the versions of themselves they thought they had to leave at the door. No magic. Just morning. And a table that keeps making room.