What's Left of Us

By: Vercher, Lantz

Sometimes the hardest part of surviving is the silence inside the walls.

The winter front that settled over the lakeshore of Oswego, New York, in mid-December did not just bury the town; it trapped a family within the quiet fractures of their own history. By the time a massive lake-effect blizzard hits on January fourth, the days of sub-zero wind and gray sky have already worn the household down to its nerve endings. Inside an older house carrying the weight of long family memory and financial strain, Bekah watches a whiteout erase the neighborhood from the kitchen window, listening as the furnace struggles against a draft that has been coming under the back door for weeks.

Upstairs, seventeen-year-old Tabitha chooses the distance of a text message and a boyfriend's house over coming home, pushing her mother's hyper-vigilance to its absolute limit. Downstairs, younger sister Sarah orbits the first floor in a silent trauma response, squaring the corners of old papers and counting blankets as if physical order could influence the weather.

When a text message from Eli arrives, a harmless omission becomes a heavy secret, shifting the pressure in the room. As the storm rattles the old frames and the lights flicker in the gathering dark, the domestic rhythms they have used to survive the winter give way to the cold realities of grief, memory, and the slow, quiet insistence of survival.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H7T9FH8F
• ISBN13: 9798185647523
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 228 Pages
• Weight: 0.51 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.0" x 8.0"