Almost: Book One - The Tethered

Joel Crane could find the rot behind any fresh coat of paint. Thirty-seven years a home inspector, he knew exactly how a house lies — the sag a seller painted over, the damp behind a clean wall — and he never once turned the instrument on himself. He kept his girlfriend provisional for a decade. He kept his own apartment like an exit he never used. When his neglected heart finally cashed in the warnings he'd filed away unread, he died alone on a Tuesday and was found days later, and the loneliness of it was the exact sum of the life.

He didn't fully leave.

Recruited by Vera Ashford — dead since 1924, dry as a closed door, rooted to the same pine-belt parish for a hundred years — Joel finds himself one of the tethered: the dead who linger to help stuck souls finish what they couldn't and move on. It's an under-resourced, disorganized, faintly absurd operation with no headquarters, no hierarchy, and no one, as far as anyone can tell, in charge. The only currency is attention.

The only rule that works is honesty. And the work erodes you — soul by soul, grief by grief, until you go dim.

His first case is a nine-year-old boy.

Theo drowned going off a dock after his dog, Reggie, and he is frozen in the inch he couldn't cross — a hand still reaching, a search that can never end, because ending it means looking at the thing directly. Reggie is stuck too, waiting the way only a dog can wait. Each anchors the other in place. Neither can let go alone. And circling them both, in a rotting house the swamp is taking back, is something that was once a man much like Joel — a soul that refused connection until its longing curdled into hunger.

To free the boy, Joel will have to do the one thing his every instinct forbids. He cannot force a soul onward. He cannot soothe one with a beautiful lie. He cannot rush the goodbye. He can only arrive — fully, on purpose, at the cost of the comfortable numbness that passed, for thirty-seven years, as being more or less fine. The man who spent a lifetime one degree removed from everything he loved must finally make the reach he refused, or watch a child become the very thing waiting for him in the dark.

Set in the heat and rot and Catholic certainty of a Louisiana parish where a great city glimmers across the water — always almost in reach — Almost is a story about grief as unfinished love, about the wound that turns out to be the work, and about whether a life held just out of reach can still have meant something. It can. But only if, even late — even dead — you finally arrive.