The Funeral for a Person Who Never Existed

When clinical psychologist Miles Fairchild returns to his childhood town of Oakhaven, he expects to attend an unusual funeral. Instead, he finds himself standing before a sealed casket belonging to a man he cannot remember-and no official record can prove ever existed.Lucian Ashford was supposedly a hero, a mentor, a lover, and the architect of Oakhaven's recovery after a devastating fire thirty years earlier. Yet there is no birth certificate, photograph, government record, or physical evidence of him. Each resident remembers Lucian differently. To some, he was an elderly savior. To others, a young lover. To others still, a mysterious presence who appeared when they needed him most.As Miles investigates, disturbing fragments of his own forgotten childhood begin to surface. A haunting melody. A faceless figure in the flames. A mysterious hand shielding him from the fire. And a blank space in his memory that seems to have the exact shape of Lucian Ashford.The deeper Miles searches, the more terrifying the truth becomes. Lucian may not have been a real man at all, but something born from collective grief-a psychological ghost created to help a traumatized community survive what it could not bear to remember. Worse, Miles may have been the first person to create him.Now Oakhaven is preparing to bury Lucian once and for all. But the casket is empty, and the funeral may not be a farewell.It may be a confession.Blurring the boundaries between memory, trauma, belief, and reality, The Funeral for a Person Who Never Existed is a haunting psychological mystery about the stories people create to survive unbearable loss-and the terrible price of finally remembering the truth.