Tuna Sandwich Empathy

A tuna fish sandwich in a hospital waiting room. A stranger's hand on your arm. The small, quiet things that keep us human when the world goes cold. You've sat in a room like this one. Maybe it was a hospital waiting room, or a bus stop in the rain, or a diner at six in the evening when you were running on empty and no one knew your name. You sat there, and you did not expect anyone to see you. And then someone did.
TUNA SANDWICH EMPATHY is a deeply felt, beautifully observed novella about what happens in the small spaces between people-the moments when a stranger turns toward you instead of away, and the whole world shifts just slightly, like a window being cracked open. Louise is twenty-six years old and has been in a hospital waiting room since before dawn. Her best friend is in emergency surgery. She is not family.
She does not know what to do with her hands. And then an elderly couple walks in-quietly, without ceremony-and one of them hands her a tuna fish sandwich wrapped in wax paper, and nothing is the same after that. Over five interconnected chapters, we follow Louise as she moves through a city full of strangers who turn out to be anything but. James, a retired hospital orderly with thirty-one years of watching people at their worst and their best, who hands her a half-finished crossword and a single word: grace.
Rosa, a young waitress saving every dollar to bring her mother home from Guatemala, who puts her hands flat on a table and, for just a moment, sets down what she has been carrying. A teenage boy in a hospital lobby who buys coffee for a room full of strangers because a storm has stopped them all in the same place and he has decided, simply, to do something about it. And finally, the moment when Louise walks back into that same waiting room and sees a young man sitting forward in his chair with his hands between his knees-and she understands, with the certainty of someone who has been there, what she is supposed to do.
Written with a sure, restrained hand that trusts the reader to feel everything, Tuna Sandwich Empathy is a story about the courage it takes to notice another person's pain, and the simple, almost weightless act of doing something about it. It is a story for anyone who has ever been handed something they did not ask for and needed more than they knew. It is a story about how kindness travels-not in grand gestures, but in paper bags, in crossword clues, in the word "Grace" written in the margin.