Some stories live in the margins.
Some live in footnotes.
And some stories demand to be told even if they never make it into the final cut—because they are the final cut. The deeper current running underneath.

That’s what this collection is.

Before the Light: Stories from The Second Coming of Grace is a companion collection of ten stories that live in the world of the novel—but stretch far beyond its borders. These are origin stories, alternate perspectives, private moments, and spiritual echoes. They give shape to the pasts my characters carry and the choices they’ve made in silence.

It begins with Everything Unsaid, a raw and vulnerable look at Liam’s coming out—an emotional flashpoint that shaped his sense of self and continues to echo in his friendship with Grace. From there, we move to Shrew, where Grace, Sigrid, and Chase first collided in a theatre school production of The Taming of the Shrew. What starts as youthful rivalry quickly becomes something more—an origin story for the heartbreak and tension that still lingers years later.

There’s The Hardening, which reveals a private moment of reckoning for Grace’s agent. And Still Here: A Queer Love Story, a gentler story of love beginning to bloom, even when trust is hard-won.

The Shape of Silence takes us back a generation—to the institutional corridors of a psychiatric hospital in northern Ontario, where a young woman faces harassment and exile at the hands of her own profession. This story builds a bridge between Evelyn and Grace, though they won’t meet until the novel.

From there, the stories become stranger, more spiritual—Grace’s first encounter with ancestral memory in The Girl in the Mirror, and the mythic energy of Tobias and the Oak Grove, where love and legacy intersect beneath the surface of waking life.

In Rivka’s Piano, we return to something quiet and tender: memory, music, and the small acts that tether us to what matters.

And finally, we arrive at The Pharmacist of Nowa Góra, the moral and emotional cornerstone of the collection. Zofia’s story doesn’t just close the book—it opens the door to The Second Coming of Grace.

I never intended to write this many. But once I began to listen, the voices came forward. They always do.