Adrift

Cora has always been good at leaving.

Jobs. Apartments. Relationships. Plans. When staying becomes complicated, she moves on before anyone can ask too many questions.

But when Cora wakes in a room at New York's Hotel Chelsea with a bruised face, a missing phone, no money, and only fragments of the night before, leaving suddenly feels less like freedom and more like flight. She cannot remember exactly how she got there, who she was with, or what happened to her. What she does know is that a ship is leaving New York that day-and she is supposed to be on it.

Six months of international volunteer work are waiting on the other side of the ocean. So Cora does what she has always done best: she keeps moving.

She boards with borrowed clothes, a military duffel that does not belong to her, and a collection of questions she has no intention of answering.

But life at sea offers very few places to disappear.

Living and working aboard a ship means sharing meals, cramped corridors, long workdays, and the uncomfortable intimacy of being surrounded by people who begin to notice things. Among them is Noah, a guarded crewman whose quiet competence and damaged hands suggest a history he is no more interested in explaining than Cora is in explaining hers.

What begins as an escape slowly becomes something Cora never planned for: routine, responsibility, friendship, attraction, and the possibility that someone might see her clearly enough to make leaving difficult.

As New York disappears behind her and the ship carries her farther from everything familiar, Cora begins to discover that distance can change the scenery without changing the person standing in it.

You can cross an ocean and still bring yourself with you.

Adrift is a character-driven contemporary novel about escape, memory, intimacy, self-sabotage, and the uneasy process of beginning again. It explores the difference between independence and isolation, between being free and simply being unattached, and what happens when a person who has built her life around leaving finally encounters reasons to stay.