Concurrent

Albert Cain is twenty-eight, living in his parents' aging house, repairing broken screens by day and quietly measuring his life against the brother who died at twenty-four. He has learned to move carefully around grief, to keep it contained inside ordinary routines. But when a conversation with a grieving stranger opens a door he did not mean to open, Albert finds himself giving voice to a possibility he has never fully named: that the past is not gone, that every moment remains alive somewhere beyond loss.

What begins as a small gathering in a library room grows into something larger. People come carrying sorrow, guilt, longing, and the kinds of questions that have no respectable place in ordinary conversation. As the meetings deepen, Albert becomes the reluctant center of a fragile new community-one built on hope, memory, and a vision of time that offers comfort to some and danger to others.

But the more people believe, the harder it becomes to say where solace ends and obsession begins.

Haunting, intimate, and quietly luminous, Concurrent is a novel about grief, love, faith, and the unbearable mystery of continuing to live after someone you love is gone. It is a story about the past we cannot leave, the lives that continue without our permission, and the possibility that what is lost may not be lost in the way we fear.