Unverified

The book

Nora Bennett has spent twenty years building a careful life: a private practice in Dallas, a marriage that ended without cruelty, a father whose church she still visits twice a year. Her sessions are recorded, transcribed, archived — a record of everything.

Then one evening the transcript shows a line that never happened.

You look different than I remembered.

Nora didn't say it. Her patient — Zoe Mercer, twenty-two, adopted, sharper than she lets on — didn't say it either. The platform calls it a glitch. But the sentence is in Nora's voice, and it keeps coming back.

As Zoe begins to search for the mother she never met, the two women discover that their histories intersect in a small Texas town, in the summer of 2004, in a file that someone marked unverified and closed. What the record contains will unmake a family. What it leaves out is worse.

A novel about memory, verification, and the difference between what happened and what was written down. For readers of Celeste Ng, Ann Napolitano, and Liane Moriarty.

Vera Rafe

Vera Rafe writes about families, records, and the gap between the two. Unverified is her first novel. She is at work on the second.

She can be reached at hello@verarafe.com. Reviewers and book clubs are always welcome to write.

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