Forgiveness Road

For thirty-five years, Aubrey and Annie Tucker have built a life together, raising six children, weathering storms both literal and otherwise, and holding fast to a love that started with a boy, a girl, and a booth at Deano’s Pizza back in Greeneville, Tennessee. Now, to celebrate their anniversary, they’ve gathered the whole sprawling family, grown children, grandchildren, and every secret they’ve been carrying, for two weeks in a cabin deep in the Smoky Mountains.

It should be simple. Cards on the porch. Fudge from the outlet mall. The kind of noise that only a big, messy family can make.

But some ghosts don’t stay buried in the mountains. They live in the blood.

Aubrey has spent twenty-five years running from the rain-slicked road that took his brother Dusty, and the storms up here keep dragging him back to it. Annie is holding a secret of her own, one that could unravel everything she and Aubrey have built. Their children arrive carrying their own storms: a foreclosure notice hidden in a purse, a lie about a firing that isn’t the whole truth, a packed bag kept by the door in case things fall apart, a marriage gone quiet in all the wrong ways. And when a chaotic, addicted aunt comes crashing up the gravel drive uninvited, what’s left of the family’s careful calm goes with her.

Over fourteen days in the mountains, the Tucker family will fight, forgive, break, and rebuild, sometimes all in the same afternoon. Forgiveness Road is a story about what happens when everything you’ve hidden finally catches up with everyone you love, and about the long, imperfect, absolutely necessary walk back toward each other.

Because family isn’t the place where nothing goes wrong. It’s the place you come back to when it does.