A Welcome Reunion

A Welcome Reunion is a short-story companion to Lucinda Berry's bestselling psychological thriller The Perfect Child, set roughly a decade after the events of that novel.

Now eighteen and newly aged out of the system, the girl once known as Janie has reinvented herself as Hope, a poised and confident young woman with a story to tell. She has written a tell-all memoir about her childhood and her time with the Bauer family, and she is ready to share it with the world, moving back to the same town where it all began.

For Hannah and Christopher Bauer, Janie is the last person they ever wanted to see again. Her return, and the very public account she is about to publish, threatens to tear open wounds they have spent years trying to close.

Told in Berry's spare, tense style, this brief, unsettling story revisits one of her most disturbing families and asks who really gets to control the narrative when the past comes back to knock on the door. Best read after The Perfect Child, it is a quick, chilling coda for readers who could not stop thinking about how that story ended.