I’ll Always Find You: The Distance Between Gone and Home

Some promises are made in elevators. Some are kept in forests. And some cost everything in between.

There is a red dot on a map that hasn't moved in a year. And a father who refuses to delete it.

It started the way most great loves do — accidentally. Ethan Moore, a software engineer who debugs code in moving elevators, and Claire Lawson, a woman who can sell a cracked donut off a floor for a dime, meet trapped between floors four and five of a Calgary conference centre on the worst Friday of her life. Forty-seven minutes. Twenty dozen donuts. One dime. One question: Tell me something true.

Thirteen years later, they have built everything — a home, a family, a life assembled from ordinary miracles. And then, on a Tuesday afternoon in November, their ten-year-old daughter Lily steps off a school bus and doesn't come home.

⏱️ Twenty-one days. That's what the caller gives them.

📍 One red dot on a map — the last known location of Lily's phone before the battery died.

💰 One million dollars. The price of a little girl's life.

🩸 One betrayal so close to home it will rewrite every memory they have ever trusted.

Told across three timelines — the love story that built a family, the twenty-one days that nearly destroyed it, and the year after that no map can measure — I'll Always Find You: The Distance Between Gone and Home is a novel about what parents promise their children in the dark, what siblings owe each other across a lifetime of damage, and what it means to keep looking for someone when every logical reason to look has already expired.

At the centre of it all is Lily Sofia Moore — ten years old, yellow raincoat, a cheap Samsung phone hidden in her lining, and a mind sharp enough to understand that the only weapon she has in a locked cabin in a winter forest is the one no one thought to take from her: herself.

❝ If you ever get lost, I'll find you. Always. ❞

— Ethan Moore, standing in a bathroom doorway, not yet knowing what that sentence would cost him.

✦ Perfect for readers who loved:

• 🔹 The Silent Patient — for the slow-burn psychological precision
• 🔹 Normal People — for the architecture of a love story told in real time
• 🔹 Where the Crawdads Sing — for the emotional depth beneath a thriller structure
• 🔹 The Couple at the Table — for the domestic horror of a betrayal from within

💔 This is not a story about a kidnapping.
It is a story about a family that was built on a sentence — I'll find you — and what happens when the sentence is put to its truest test.

Some distances cannot be measured in miles.
Some can only be measured in what you are willing to survive.