Hello all,

               Have you ever lost a friendship? The short answer is, yes, of course you have. Maybe it had been a fleeting one that was born and died with summer vacation. Maybe you’d known the other person your entire life. Those friendships were beautiful, they meant something to you, and when they hit their breaking point, they did just that— they broke.

                In my next book THE LAKE AT IKORAN, a group of friends found their breaking point after a terrible, awful weekend in upstate New York. Five years later, the surviving members of that friend group have reunited to discuss what they went through, to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives and to see what’s left among the ashes. 

                While the book isn’t ready to meet the world just yet, I do want to share a little bit of it with you. Below, I have added the prologue for your reading pleasure. It may not be very long, but I like it. Enjoy, and keep an eye out for more information regarding THE LAKE AT IKORAN in the coming months! 

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                 One by one, the survivors arrived at the diner.

                 They arrived at sunrise; the first one- the one who escaped in the car- took a seat at the counter and ordered coffee which she did not drink. She just sat there and stared at it with her eyes wide and her shaking hands clasped around the mug. No one paid any attention to her. 

                 The other three each came by foot. The second one walked in slowly and almost didn’t sit by her. He did though, and the steps he took to close the distance he should have savored because soon the adrenaline in his system would wear off, and the pain that had been brewing in his leg would finally hit him full force. When the third came, he also joined them, and when the fourth one arrived, he might have done the same but thought better and sat in a booth closest to the door. 

                No one dared sit by him.

                None of them said a word to each other. One may have nodded to another and maybe they would nod back. When they escaped, they had had no way of knowing who got out. All they knew was that they had to survive and sometimes that means making hard decisions. Sometimes that means picking and choosing who comes with you and other times that means looking after number one. 

                But they were all friends, right? They cared about each other, didn’t they? 

                Of course, they did. And that was still true even if most of them couldn’t look each other in the eye. Not after what they had been through. 

                The survivors did not speak to each other again for a long time after the diner. They all went their separate ways and though at first that felt strange, time— as it does all things— made that feeling fade away, forgotten. And with that fading, with forgetting, they assumed would also soon come healing and something they imagined was like moving on. 

                Like.