Iris Calloway has spent eleven years standing in the middle of rooms, keeping families from breaking. As a mediator at the Providence Family Court, she has learned to hear the sentence underneath the shouting the fear beneath the anger, the grief beneath the accusations, the love buried so deep that the people who feel it can no longer find it. She is very good at what she does. For other people. For herself, she has learned only how to keep people at a distance. Her father has not spoken to her in six years. Her apartment is quiet, her evenings are empty, and she has long since stopped believing that closeness is something she deserves.Then Marlowe arrives. He is tall, brown-eyed, and unremarkable in the way that is meant to put frightened people at ease. He wears a sensible navy jacket and folds his hands at his waist. The lanyard around his neck says Humanoid Unit, and he has been assigned to Room 4B her room, her cases, her carefully ordered life. Iris does not want him there. She does not trust him. She tells him not to speak unless she nods.But Marlowe notices things. He notices the woman clutching a diaper bag like a shield. He notices the father glaring at his own shoes. He notices the child in the waiting area, sitting with an unread book, waiting at a window for a car that is always late. And when he asks the question no one else has thought to ask, Iris watches a family that has been broken for years begin impossibly to heal. He notices her, too. The coffee she drinks, one sugar and no milk. The old injury she rubs when a session turns difficult. The phone she checks every evening at 6:05, the hour her father used to call.As the months pass and the cases accumulate, Iris finds herself telling this machine things she has never told anyone. She finds herself laughing at his quiet observations, lingering in the empty cafeteria, walking beside him along the bay as the water turns lavender and gold. She finds herself hoping for the first time in years that peace is possible. But Marlowe is a pilot program, a budget line the city council can take away. When a notice arrives announcing a public hearing that could send him to Anchorage, to Phoenix, to anywhere that is not Providence, Iris must decide whether to protect the professional distance she has spent her whole life building or to stand in the middle of a room and fight for something she never believed she could have.Splintered Peace is a love story about the spaces between people and the courage it takes to close them. It is about the questions that heal us, the silences that hold us, and the fragile, resilient peace that arrives not whole, but in pieces and still holds weight.
