Pocketed

Nothing we carry stays ours for long.

Pen finds it in a bag of junk jewelry on her way home from a graveyard double: an old silver lighter, dented and worn smooth where somebody's thumb rested for decades. She has nine days left on her apartment, an email from a dying stranger she hasn't answered, and no reason at all to keep a lighter. She keeps it anyway.

Then she sets it down for one moment, and it's gone. It goes into the pocket of a man thirty-one days sober who just needed a light. From there it passes to a paramedic who has spent his whole life making sure nobody gets close. Then to a sixteen-year-old boy holding a secret that could blow his family apart.

None of them know where it came from. None of them will keep it for long. Each of them carries it through the hardest stretch of their life, and then lets it go.

Pocketed is a novel in four lives about the things we hold on to, the people who never hear our goodbyes, and the strangers who pick up what we leave behind. "Perfect for readers who loved The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and A Man Called Ove."

Book One of the Pocketed Series

Dawn Prieto is a therapist who has spent her career listening to people tell the truth about their lives. Pocketed is her first novel.