The Gift
The difference between curing and caring — and what it costs to tell the truth.
He promised the dying only one thing: that they would not be alone. A doctor who won't sell false hope, a rich man dying too late, and a nine-year-old who has something to give that none of them can earn.
A story about grace, restraint, and the one Gift that lasts forever.
In a worn old building on East Baltimore Street, Dr. Jacob Moss treats the patients no one else will sit with.
He gives the dying his time, his attention, and one promise: they will not be alone at the end. He refuses to promise more. He has seen what false hope does to people, and he would lose the clinic before he would sell it. He may have to.
Henry Miles shows up rich, dying, and decades too late. He spent a lifetime using people. Now, with whatever the cancer leaves him, he wants to learn how to love the daughter and grandson he walked out on. Down the hall, a nine-year-old named Timmy Parker has the same disease that killed Jacob's mother. Somehow Timmy is the one teaching the grown-ups how to stop bracing and receive The Gift.
Then a grieving family, an ambitious reporter, and a wave of online outrage that turns out to be paid for drag the clinic into court. To save the people who trusted him, Jacob has to prove the hardest thing in the world to prove: a thing he did not do. He never promised a cure. He never gave one.
What saves him is not a miracle. It is a nurse's chart, and a line he would not cross. And it is a nine-year-old named Timmy, who received the Gift of Salvation — the one Gift that lasts forever — and left it impressed upon his mother's heart, while all who knew him saw his peace and carried it.
The opening pages
The Whisper Before the Storm
1999
The rain had been falling for hours, drumming against the roof like a thousand fingers trying to get in.
Jacob's eyes were swollen from hours of crying.
Seeing his mother lying in that bed had crushed something inside him. She looked smaller now, swallowed by the sheets, her body tired from fighting a sickness no child should have had to understand.
The room smelled like medicine and lavender lotion. An oxygen machine hummed beside the bed, steady and cold, while a half-finished glass of water sat untouched on the nightstand next to her Bible.
Cancer. Pancreatic cancer.
"The worst kind," he had heard Uncle Benny say on the phone with Aunt Julie.
Benny was his mother's brother. Jacob knew that the way he knew his own name — without ever having been taught it. But he had never heard his uncle sound like that before. Benny's voice was a voice that fixed things, that carried heavy objects up stairs without complaining, that told Jacob to stand up straight and look people in the eye. It was not a voice that broke in the middle of a word.
It broke that night.
A brother's voice, learning that the sister he had grown up beside was running out of time.
"For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God."Ephesians 2:8 · KJV
Read The Gift
The Gift is told across three books. The first is in final edits now, with the second and third to follow. Leave your address and I’ll tell you the day Book One is ready.
Read the Opening →Book One · in final edits