A propulsive, unmissable debut, The Waitress follows an acclaimed writer’s search for the truth after her husband pays a waitress from the town cafe to disappear—an act he refuses to explain, even as it unleashes a torrent of secrets.

A writer has rented a cabin on the Oregon coast with her husband of three years, determined to finish her next book. Their breakfast is interrupted one morning by a knock on the door: it’s the waitress from the café in town. She looks distressed, though she says little. Within minutes, the writer’s husband, Hayes, offers the young woman five thousand dollars to leave and never come back.

The writer is immediately consumed by questions: Who is the waitress? Why would Hayes give her so much money, unbidden? What did the writer miss? In the absence of a satisfying explanation, her idyllic situation begins to curdle before her eyes. Convinced that if she can find the waitress everything will be set right, she begins an amateur investigation that swiftly spirals out of control, surfacing questions about her own past in the process: her career ambitions, her relationship with her son, and her fledgling second marriage.

A tour de force of tension and obsession, The Waitress probes the thorniest depths of trust, regret, and social expectation to ask what we are willing to sacrifice in order to become the truest version of ourselves.