THE TENTH-THOUSANDTH PIECE

Nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine pieces. One taken out on purpose.

Mbalyn Veyra has spent eleven years learning how not to need anybody. She has a career, money, a flat she could hand back in an afternoon, and one chair in the kitchen. She calls it maturity.

Then her mother dies and leaves her a jigsaw.

Ten thousand pieces. Nineteen years of work. A river town demolished before Mbalyn was born, laid out under glass on the dining table. Nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine of them are in place. One is gone. And in the box there is a card in her mother's hand:

Don't ask where it belongs. Ask why it was missing.

Beneath the card is a name. It belongs to a man Mbalyn has never met, who sat at her mother's table for ten years, who knows exactly why that piece was removed - and who promised a dying woman he would say nothing until her daughter was ready to hear it.

Mbalyn has never been ready for anything.

And she is not the only person still looking for the tenth-thousandth piece.

A slow-burning novel about inheritance, courage, and the ordinary cost of loving anyone at all.