My sister has been dead for fourteen years.
So why does my mother still set a place for her at Sunday dinner?
Every Sunday, Claire Bell returns to her parents' house for the same family ritual.
The same table.
The same meal.
The same careful conversations about everything except the one person nobody wants to mention.
Emily.
Claire's seventeen-year-old sister disappeared fourteen years ago.
She was never found.
Eventually, she was declared dead.
The family grieved.
They moved on.
Or at least Claire thought they had.
Until one Sunday evening, she notices something different.
Five places have been set at the table.
There are only four people coming to dinner.
When Claire reaches for the extra chair, her mother grabs her wrist.
"Don't move it."
Claire asks why.
Her mother's answer makes the room go silent.
"She'll need somewhere to sit when she comes home."
Then Claire sees what is lying beneath the empty plate.
A photograph.
It shows Emily.
Not the seventeen-year-old girl who disappeared.
A grown woman.
Standing outside Claire's house.
And the photograph was taken three days ago.
Claire's first instinct is that someone is playing a cruel game.
Until she notices her husband Mark staring at the photograph.
He recognizes the woman.
And he's terrified.
Because Mark knows something Claire doesn't.
Emily may never have died.
Soon Claire discovers a letter written in her sister's handwriting.
It contains only one message:
Mom, I am not dead.
Please stop telling Claire that I am.
Suddenly, fourteen years of grief begin to unravel.
The police investigation.
The night Emily disappeared.
The argument nobody talks about.
A hit-and-run that happened days earlier.
A damaged red car.
Secret payments.
Hidden letters.
And a promise Claire's own husband made long before he married her.
Everyone in the Bell family has been protecting a secret.
But they haven't all been protecting the same secret.
And when Emily finally comes home, Claire discovers something even more devastating.
Her sister didn't disappear because she wanted to leave her family.
She disappeared because she was afraid of them.
Now the empty chair at their table is waiting for the woman everyone agreed to mourn.
But Emily isn't coming home for forgiveness.
She's coming home to tell the truth.
And one member of the family will do anything to keep that chair empty.
The Empty Chair at Our Table is an emotional psychological thriller about two sisters, a family built around a fourteen-year-old lie, buried guilt, betrayal, marriage, memory, and the devastating difference between protecting someone and protecting a secret.
Perfect for readers who love missing-person mysteries, dysfunctional families, long-buried secrets, complicated sisters, domestic suspense, emotional psychological thrillers, and twists that change everything you thought you knew.
For fourteen years, we kept an empty chair at our table.
Tonight, the woman it belongs to is coming home.
