WHAT REMAINS AFTER by Pauline J. Grabia

WHAT REMAINS AFTER

Some stories do not end when the danger passes. 

Beth Clark has not returned to her hometown in decades, since the childhood she survived there nearly destroyed her.

When her estranged mother dies, Beth comes back to rural Alberta for a funeral that feels carefully rewritten. The eulogies are tidy. The past is sanitized. But inside the abandoned bungalow where she and her brother once lived, Beth finds objects that shatter the illusion—and awaken memories of abuse, neglect, and the systems that failed to protect her.

When Beth's younger brother is critically injured in a sudden accident, the present collides with the past. Keeping vigil at his hospital bedside, Beth is drawn back into the summer that changed everything: the violence in their home, the silence of those who should have intervened, and the foster family whose quiet faith offered the first real safety either child had known.

Told across dual timelines, What Remains After is a literary psychological suspense novel about trauma and memory, belief and betrayal, and the long, unfinished work of survival. It asks what it truly means to forgive—and what remains when the truth is finally spoken.

TOPICS OF CONVERSATION

• Writing through personal trauma, and how fiction can be cathartic
• Why a funeral, not a flashback, opens the story
• When the adults who should protect a child look away
• The quiet heroes who keep trying against a slow, imperfect system
• How trust is rebuilt one small moment at a time
• Two siblings, one childhood, two very different paths to healing
• What pursuing justice actually costs a survivor
• Why the ending stays small, quiet, and real
• What's next for Pauline J. Grabia?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pauline J. Grabia is a Canadian novelist of Redemptive Realism—fiction that faces the dark but ends in light. A survivor of childhood abuse and neglect, she writes to reveal how God’s grace redeems what the world calls irredeemable.

A graduate of the University of Alberta, Pauline lived in both Edmonton and Dubai, where she tutored English and began her debut novel, What Remains After. She now resides in Leduc, Alberta, with her husband of more than thirty years, Stuart. They have two daughters and two beloved grandchildren.

When she isn’t writing, Pauline enjoys traveling, painting, cross-stitching, baking, and walking in nature. Her stories invite readers to look honestly at brokenness and to discover the quiet miracles of grace that endure.

Learn more about Pauline Grabia and her work at https://paulinejgrabia.com/

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