The Lost Husband: A Novel

The Lost Husband: A Novel

A tender and heartwarming novel that explores the trials of losing what matters most—and how there’s always more than we can imagine left to find—from the  New York Times  bestselling author of  How to Walk Away  and  Things You Save in a Fire Now a major motion picture starring Leslie Bibb and Josh Duhamel • “A sweet tale about creating the family you need.”— People   Dear Libby, It occurs to me that you and your two children have been living with your mother for—Dear Lord!—two whole years, and I’m writing to see if you'd like to be rescued.   The letter comes out of the blue, and just in time for Libby Moran, who—after the sudden death of her husband, Danny—went to stay with her hypercritical mother. Now her crazy Aunt Jean has offered Libby an escape: a job and a place to live on her farm in the Texas Hill Country. Before she can talk herself out of it, Libby is packing the minivan, grabbing the kids, and hitting the road.   Life on Aunt Jean’s goat farm is both more wonderful and more mysterious than Libby could have imagined. Beyond the animals and the strenuous work, there is quiet—deep, country quiet. But there is also a shaggy, gruff (though purportedly handsome, under all that hair) farm manager with a tragic home life, a formerly famous feed-store clerk who claims she can contact Danny “on the other side,” and the eccentric aunt Libby never really knew but who turns out to be exactly what she’s been looking for. And despite everything she’s lost, Libby soon realizes how much more she’s found. She hasn’t just traded one kind of crazy for another: She may actually have found the place to bring her little family—and herself—back to life. It’s a new year, and Libby Moran is starting a new life. Three years ago, she lost her husband in a car accident. Left with an empty savings account and two small children to feed, Libby sold her house and moved in with her critical, passive-aggressive mother. So when Libby receives a letter from her estranged aunt offering an escape—room, board, and a small salary in exchange for helping around the farm—she grabs it, uprooting her family to the country to milk goats and make cheese. But her new life takes some adjusting to. Her eccentric aunt is harboring a secret, the unkempt farm manager stirs up conflicting feelings, Libby’s daughter encounters a problem at school, and the psychic clerk at the feed store is determined to bring back Libby’s lost husband. Center writes endearingly of love and family in her fourth novel, with lessons about loss, gain, standing up for oneself, and accepting that your best is good enough. Fans of well-crafted romantic women’s fiction won’t be disappointed. --Diane Holcomb “A sweet tale about creating the family you need.” — People “A heartwarming novel that explores the trials of losing what matters most.” — USA Today   “[Katherine] Center writes endearingly of love and family in her fourth novel, with lessons about loss, gain, standing up for oneself, and accepting that your best is good enough. Fans of well-crafted romantic women’s fiction won’t be disappointed.” — Booklist “A novel about family, love and forgiveness . . . heart-rending and heartwarming.” — Kirkus Reviews Katherine Center is the  New York Times  bestselling author of  How to Walk Away  and the upcoming  Things You Save in a Fire  (August 2019), as well as five other bittersweet comic novels. She writes about how we fall down--and how we get back up. Six Foot Pictures is currently adapting her fourth novel,  The Lost Husband , into a feature film starring Josh Duhamel and Leslie Bibb. Katherine has been compared to both Nora Ephron and Jane Austen, and the Dallas Morning News calls her stories, "satisfying in the most soul-nourishing way." Katherine recently gave a TEDx talk on how stories teach us empathy, and her work has appeared in  USA Today ,  InStyle ,  Redbook ,  People ,  Vanity Fair ,  The Atlantic ,  Real Simple ,  Southern Living , and  InTouch , among others. Katherine lives in her hometown of Houston, Texas, with her fun husband, two sweet kids, and fluffy-but-fierce dog. Chapter 1     My husband had been dead for three years before I started trying to contact him.   By then, our house was long sold, his suits were donated, and his wedding ring was in a safe-deposit box. All I kept with me was a shoebox full of meaningless stuff: a button from a shirt, an old grocery list, his driver’s license, his car keys, a doodle he’d drawn on a Post-it. That was everything of Danny’s I’d held on to: a box of junk.   That, and, of course, his children.   Piece by piece, I had left our old life behind—though I suppose you could argue that it had left me first—and now I was in the final stages of starting over, which meant, for my little lopsided family, leaving town. And so on this Texas-warm New Year’s Eve morning, I was following a ribbon of asphalt out to the countryside, checking and rechecking my directions while my kids poked each other wit