The weight of names

In a small town shattered by an unthinkable tragedy, one woman becomes the living memorial for its pain. Third-grade teacher Elara Vance was a quiet soul in a loud world, finding solace in the honest emotions of her students, especially a gentle, imaginative boy named Leo. But when a catastrophic accident steals Leo and his classmates away, a strange and terrible power awakens within her. A cold, heavy stone manifests in Elara's chest—the physical weight of Leo's final, profound loneliness. She soon discovers she is a Grief Eater, a vessel for the sorrow of others. One by one, the townspeople's anguish imprints itself on her body as permanent, stony weights: a shard of a father's rage, the fused pearls of shattered twins, the crushing amber of a mother's boundless love. Her body is no longer her own. It is a walking cemetery, a catalog of loss. As the collective burden threatens to break her physically and spiritually, she faces an impossible choice: surrender to a doctor who offers to "cure" her by cutting the sorrows out, or embrace her fate as the keeper of these sacred, painful names. She chose to carry their grief so they wouldn't have to. But the weight of their names may cost her everything. A haunting and beautifully written novel about the cost of empathy, the shape of loss, and the love that remains when everything else is gone.