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by Jody Doll (Author)
Imagine not being able to say "I love you" to the people you cherish most.
Alice O'Brien has spent her entire life trying to understand why-why life made her the way she is, why silence became her prison. As a child, she was diagnosed with selective mutism, a condition that left her unable to speak, especially to the one person she loved most: her father.
But Danny O'Brien refused to let silence define their relationship. Together they created a private world of gestures, signals, and written messages through a simple correspondence they called Ask Dad, where Alice could ask the questions she couldn't say aloud and her father could guide her through life's hardest moments.
Eight years ago, Danny died in a devastating plane crash.
Now, on the verge of marrying her fiancé and preparing an essay for a Father's Day bridal contest, Alice finds herself reflecting on the man who shaped her life. Then an unexpected discovery changes everything: her father's laptop-miraculously recovered from the wreckage-has finally been returned to her after years hidden away by her mother.
Certain that the computer holds the final pieces of her father's story, Alice begins searching through its contents, uncovering memories, secrets, and questions she never expected to face.
Meanwhile, a survivor of the same plane crash carries fragments of the past that refuse to stay buried.
As their stories begin to intertwine, Alice uncovers truths hidden within her family's past-revelations that slowly unravel everything she thought she knew. With each discovery, the story of her father, the crash, and her own childhood becomes something far more complicated than grief alone.
Told through multiple voices and shifting perspectives, The Words We've Lost And Found is a layered psychological story about love, loss, and the desperate human desire to repair what has been broken-even when the truth threatens to shatter everything.
