The Butcher on Carletta Lake
One dying man. One last Thanksgiving. And eighteen years of silence waiting for someone brave enough to break it.
When eighty-year-old butcher Vic Regalia receives a number he doesn't care for, he doesn't ask for sympathy. He asks his niece Claire for something far more difficult: reopen the old barn on Carletta Lake and bring the family together for Thanksgiving.
All of them.
Five weeks. A drained building. Hundreds of guests. Forty pounds of potatoes. More gnocchi than anyone should reasonably attempt.
Claire can handle the food.
It's the guest list that becomes a problem.
Because one family hasn't been invited to a Regalia table in eighteen years. No one will tell Claire exactly why. Her mother won't talk about it. Her husband knows more than he'll say. And the entire town of Pine Ridge has become remarkably skilled at protecting an old wound by pretending it isn't there.
But Vic is running out of time-and this Thanksgiving was never really about the turkey.
As Claire begins asking the questions everyone else stopped asking years ago, she uncovers a tragedy that changed two families, a silence that became its own kind of betrayal, and an old Regalia tradition with a meaning they nearly forgot:
Always set one plate more. Because you never know who might come.
Now a table that has stood empty for eighteen years is being set again.
Whether the people who belong at it will come is another matter.
The Butcher on Carletta Lake is a warm, deeply emotional small-town novel about family, grief, forgiveness, the things we leave unsaid, and the extraordinary courage it sometimes takes simply to ask.
Return to Pine Ridge, where everybody knows your business, somebody is always bringing food, and there is always room for one more at the table.
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