Promise

At seven years old, Peter learned that love requires a performance—and that the cost of belonging is the erasure of self. When his parents' absence becomes absolute, he's sent to boarding school, where he begins the long work of surviving among strangers, learning to be what others need rather than who he is. Told with unflinching precision and devastating quiet, Promise traces one boy's passage through grief and fracture toward a tentative, hard-won understanding of what authentic connection might mean. This is a novel about the slow accumulation of wounds and the slower, more difficult process of learning to be seen.