richard warburg

Six strangers sit down in Room 3 on a Wednesday afternoon. Not one of them can say out loud why they came. Warren hasn't been able to look at his wife since the surgery. Judith has been beside him for thirty-seven years and has never felt more invisible. Theodore hasn't been touched by anyone since 1994. Nadia has stopped letting anyone see her body. Simone's husband left because he couldn't do it any more.
Daisuke is twenty-one and has learned that people are either frightened of his wheelchair or far too interested in it. Cal came back from Kandahar with a nervous system that reads a hand on his shoulder as an incoming threat. They meet every week at four. Bad coffee, a circle of chairs, no experts - just people discovering, one Wednesday at a time, that the thing they assumed was over is still available to them in a shape they hadn't imagined.
Over a year the circle widens. People arrive, confess, bolt, come back. Some find someone. Some lose someone. One of them is dying and knows it, and keeps showing up anyway. A novel about desire after diagnosis - and about what happens to love when a body changes and can't change back. Includes a glossary of intimacy and illness terminology, character guide, and nineteen condition-specific guides for readers navigating this themselves.