The Empty Chair

Fifteen years in, almost everything over the airfield is a drone now—but the police still fly the helicopter, and the window over Dan's desk still hums. Jack is fourteen and sleeps in a patch of October sun. The four o'clock is new: Marcus Bell, a middle-school history teacher, eleven months past his father's death. Under Reason for seeking services he has written Grief, and under that, smaller: I talk to him every night.

He comes down the hall carrying a tablet the way you'd carry a cake. On it is his father—not a photograph, a man in a cardigan who blinks, looks past Marcus at Dan, and says good afternoon in a rough Louisville voice with smoke still in it. The third Dan novel is set in a near future where the people we lose can be rendered from what they left behind and keep talking, keep remembering, keep asking for us. It asks what a therapist owes a client, what a son owes a father, and who is sitting in the empty chair.