The Fourth Footprint

A neurosurgeon who has sworn never to lose anyone. A family of six. And a November morning when time itself begins to flicker.

Dr. Sarah Wu can read a brain the way other people read weather. For nineteen years she has stood between strangers and the end of them-and won. Then the impossible starts: a plane that stops in the air, a reflection that arrives a second too early, a hair-thin doubled seam of stars stretched across the night sky.

When the world three hundred miles south of Boston begins to come apart, Sarah does the only thing her vow allows. She takes her husband and their four children north, to a cold cabin in the Vermont woods, and tries to keep all of them warm, fed, and counted.

But the break has followed them. In the silence of the mountains the doublings grow quieter and stranger-a copy that runs ahead of its source, a reflection that shows the next second before it comes. And Sarah, who has spent her life counting heartbeats and watching for the bleed no one else can see, begins, without ever deciding to, to count footprints in the snow.

THE FOURTH FOOTPRINT is a literary novel about time, grief, and the fierce arithmetic of a mother's love-a story about what we will let ourselves believe, and what we refuse to, in order to keep the people we cannot bear to lose.