Where the River Bends

Paperback edition. The call came on a Tuesday in October, and I was thirty-four days sober — still counting days like a prisoner scratches marks on a wall. “June?” It was Marta, my brother's wife, with that rehearsed tightness in her voice. “It is your mom. She fell. She is at the county hospital.” Over 93 chapters, one woman's early sobriety collides with a family emergency she cannot run from and cannot fix with a drink. June has to show up — shaky, sober, and present — for the people she once disappeared on, in a season when every old instinct is screaming at her to run. It is about mothers and daughters, the lies families tell to stay comfortable, and learning to stand steady when the river of a life takes a hard bend. Some bends you do not choose. You just learn to steer through them. A novel about what holds when everything is shifting — honest about the fragility of early recovery and the quiet strength it takes to stay. For anyone who has ever had to be brave on the very days they felt the weakest.