Tadaima

A house in Tokyo. A diary she can't read. A man who can translate every word - except the ones that matter most.

Emma Cole is good at knowing what things are worth. As a real estate agent in Denver, she can walk through a house and see its price before she's reached the kitchen. So when she inherits a small, old house in Tokyo from a grandmother she never knew, she flies out with a return ticket, a spreadsheet, and a plan: appraise it, sell it, go home.
The house has other ideas.

In its rooms, Emma finds a diary written in Japanese - decades of entries in her grandmother's hand. In its garden wall, a gate that opens onto a woodworker's workshop. And in its quiet neighbor Ren, the only person who can translate the diary's words, she finds someone who knew her grandmother in ways Emma is only beginning to understand.

As the diary reveals a story of love, loss, and silence spanning thirty years and two continents, Emma begins to see that some things can't be appraised. That the distance between two people isn't always measured in miles. And that the Japanese word for I'm home is said not when you arrive at a place, but when you return to where you belong.

A novel about language, silence, and the kind of love that arrives like a word you didn't know you knew. For anyone who has ever walked into a room and felt it remembering someone.