THE ROAD HIKER

Lee Soto has gone twenty-three years without an accident — a man other drivers trust with cars worth more than most houses. When a private client in San Diego requests him by name for one last cross-country haul, it looks like just another perfect delivery.

It isn't.

Somewhere in the Pennsylvania fog, the road takes something from him that he doesn't yet understand he's lost. For thousands of miles after, strangers keep mistaking him for someone they already know. A photograph he never packed keeps changing its message. And at the edge of every horizon, a quiet man in a long coat is waiting — never speaking, never asking for a ride, always walking west.

By the time Lee reaches the ocean, he has one delivery left to make — not the car in his trailer, but the goodbye he never had time to give the people who loved him.

A cross-country ghost story about the cost of always being somewhere else, and the last, best chance to come home.