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SOME STORIES DO NOT END WHEN THE DANGER PASSES.
Beth Clark has not returned to her hometown in decades, since the childhood she survived there nearly destroyed her.
When her estranged mother dies, Beth comes back to rural Alberta for a funeral that feels carefully rewritten. The eulogies are tidy. The past is sanitized. But inside the abandoned bungalow where she and her brother once lived, Beth finds objects that shatter the illusion—and awaken memories of abuse, neglect, and the systems that failed to protect her.
When Beth’s younger brother is critically injured in a sudden accident, the present collides with the past. Keeping vigil at his hospital bedside, Beth is drawn back into the summer that changed everything: the violence in their home, the silence of those who should have intervened, and the foster family whose quiet faith offered the first real safety either child had known.
Told across dual timelines, What Remains After is a literary psychological suspense novel about trauma and memory, belief and betrayal, and the long, unfinished work of survival. It asks what it truly means to forgive—and what remains when the truth is finally spoken.
Enjoy an Excerpt
Frigid cold seeped through Beth’s gloves from the steering wheel of her rental car to her fingers; her arthritis flared. The ache in her joints echoed the pain in her heart. Why, after all this time, with her specialized education and training as well as years of personal trauma therapy, couldn’t she shake the anxiety and hatred that still clung to Virgie’s name, and to that of her Uncle Gary?
Otto was composed. Somehow, he’d managed to recover. But she was still a mess. As a trained therapist, she told herself she should be able to work it out, but she couldn’t.
She drove up and down the quiet streets of the town. Except for a new grocery store that had replaced Gordon’s after it burned down about five years earlier, not much had changed. Like the church, the community seemed frozen in time. Truck models were newer, and teens wore different clothes, but the vibe of Coverville stayed the same: slow, conservative, and decaying. Around here, stories were currency, and nothing else. They didn’t step on others’ toes. Mind your own business. Keep moving.
Beth didn’t understand why she paused in front of the small, condemned bungalow with its rotting fence, missing shingles, and boarded-up windows. It looked like the only creatures that had lived there in years were cockroaches and mice. But they had been there long before the human residents moved out. Virgie was the last to leave when, six years before, Alzheimer’s had left her unable to care for herself any longer, and she ended up in a home.
Rebecka told Beth that Otto had thought about taking Virgie in, but Rebecka stood her ground. She wasn’t going to live under the same roof as his mother. Forgiveness was one thing; sharing a home was another. Otto did what he always did—sacrificed. He found a great nursing home, but it was also expensive. Beth suspected her brother had made up the difference out of his own pocket, since Old Age Security and Canada Pension didn’t cover the entire cost.
About the Author Pauline J. Grabia is a Canadian novelist whose work explores trauma, memory, faith, and the moral consequences of silence. Writing under the Stories of Consequence banner, she is drawn to stories that face difficult truths without spectacle and seek light without sentimentality. What Remains After is a literary psychological suspense novel rooted in rural Alberta and shaped by questions of survival, forgiveness, and what endures.
Buy the book at Amazon.
