Adrift

by Will Dean

Genres: Psychological Thrillers; Thrillers

Synopsis

The author of the “master class in suspense” (Shari Lapena, New York Times bestselling author) The Chamber returns with a high-tension thriller about a family’s descent into darkness that is perfect for fans of Dennis Lehane and Lisa Jewell.

Peggy and Drew, both aspiring writers, move to an isolated canal boat with their fourteen-year-old son. Peggy is the glue that holds their family together, even as their son is bullied relentlessly for his physique and his family’s lack of money. But when Drew becomes frustrated by his wife’s sudden writing success, he moves their boat further and further from civilization.

With their increasing isolation, personal challenges become harder to ignore, even as they desperately try to break toxic generational patterns. But when Drew’s gaslighting becomes too much for Peggy to take, it sets off a catastrophic series of events.

With Will Dean’s signature “well-drawn characters and excellent prose” (Sarah Pearse, New York Times bestselling author), Adrift is gripping exploration of the ties that bind when everything spirals out of control.

Release date: February 17, 2026

Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

Chapter 1: Peggy Jenkins

1 PEGGY JENKINS Robertson’s Marina Illinois-Indiana-Kentucky tristate area, Fall 1994

My name is Peggy Augusta Jenkins.

As of last month I live with my husband and son on a forty-year-old narrow boat. I do not possess a birth certificate. The sheets on my bed are damp from condensation and my husband is sitting with his back to our woodburning stove at the far end of the vessel, naked, save for his socks, writing his novel.

This is our last chance.

A train passes in the distance. Fortunate souls leaving this town to venture north toward Chicago, or south toward Memphis. Others, misguided, arriving.

My son sleeps on the converted dinette sofa at the center of the boat and I worry every day that he may not make it to adulthood. Mothers profess how they would kill for their offspring, but I know I would go further still.

I would not hesitate.

Moonlight splinters through swaying poplar branches. The boat shifts gently in the water, almost imperceptibly, as the grebes and swamp sparrows outside our walls ready themselves for their nests.

The creak of wood over steel hull. Is he coming this way? My shoulders are tight and I am aware of the pulse in my ears.

Another creak.

My breath clouds in front of my eyes.

The door to our room opens.

The man I married fifteen years ago steps inside. He shaved his head before his writing session and now his porcelain skin glistens with sweat.

“You made noise.” His face is as expressionless as a pebble worn smooth in a river.

I frown.

“Tell me why,” he says.

I sit up. Offer a smile. “Drew, I don’t think I made any noise, I swear. Not a sound.”

He closes the door gently, unnaturally slowly, and positions himself next to the bed, looming over me.

“It wasn’t the boy. I just want to know why. So we can move on.”

“What noise?”

He swallows.

His bald head shines.

“I’m out there trying to get words down, for the good of this family, sweating next to the fire for you and him, and you’re back here wrecking my concentration. Was it on purpose?”

I shake my head.

“By accident then, was it?”

I have been here before, so many times. Lost in his maze of backward logic. There is no escape. I have tried. There is no winning.

I cringe.

A bulge beneath his lips. His tongue moving slowly over his teeth.

“Night of work wasted but at least you owned up to it, Peg.”

“I didn’t think I made any noise,” I say. “I apologize if I did.”

“You didn’t think you made a noise, but I know you did. That’s the difference we’re looking at. Plain as day. Thinking versus knowing.”

He sits down lightly, slowly, softly, on the bed.

“Who was that fella you were talking with earlier?”

“Sorry?”

“Fella with a bicycle. Beer gut.”

“Oh, he has the next boat over, the blue one. I was just talking about the fridge.”

“That right?”

“He was an electrician, Drew. Before he retired. It just came up.”

“Just came up.”

More sweat emerging from his pores.

“I thought he could fix it and save us some money.”

“How come he can fix the fridge and I can’t?”

“He was an electrician.”

His nostrils flare. “This old boat’s not perfect, far from it, but if there’s things to fix it’ll be me who does it. Boy can watch, learn something useful. I won’t have strangers coming in here, gawping at my papers when I’m at the yard working.”

“He never came inside, Drew.”

“He never will.”

I am so tired.

“What did he say, this electrician?”

“Nothing much.”

“That right?”

“He said that he’ll take a look if we need him to. That he’s a little out of date but he can look at our wiring, too, our batteries.”

The scent of soap and sweat. Engine oil.

“And what did you say?”

“I said…”

“Word-for-word.”

“I said I’d talk to you.”

He grits his teeth. “I’ll move us away tomorrow morning. Give us some privacy. We can’t afford the marina anyhow, not with the boy’s school uniform. It’s time we were away, you said so yourself, and you were right.”

“I don’t think I ever said that, Drew. I like it here. And Samson’s starting to make friends.”

“Boy doesn’t need friends around here, he needs to learn how to work for a living. You want coffee?”

I take a moment.

“I said, do you want coffee?”

“Please.”

He stands up and wipes his face with his rough palms and walks out, his footsteps deliberate and noiseless.

The moonlight reflects off the canal surface and shimmers on the ceiling. There is no railroad noise now.

We would not even have this decrepit British-made boat if it wasn’t for Mom, but he does not see it that way. She died fifteen years ago, six months before our wedding, a year before Samson arrived, and it still breaks my heart she missed those two events. She would have walked me up the aisle proudly, she had it all planned out, her outfit paid for in installments. I thought she was doing well. She pined for her family in England, what was left of it—my cousins, her old friends, her childhood town—but I had thought she was content. She seemed to be as besotted with Drew as I was. She had read his short stories and said encouraging things. Then, on the night before my twentieth birthday, she swallowed pills when we were out, and she never woke up. That’s how we came to live in her bungalow. When we could no longer afford the bills we sold it for this three-hundred-square-foot boat and now all our money, her money, what little was left, is tied up in this vessel.

Every dime.

This, here, now, is our last chance.

I am determined to make it work.

For Samson’s sake.

I hear Drew fill the pan and place it on the gas burner. Life isn’t too bad here in the marina. Propane bottles for cooking, public water, and fuel for the woodstove at the far end of the boat by his bureau desk. Between the woodstove and the desk sits Mom’s pale gray rug we took from the bungalow. We have electric from a cable. It is all easy here in Robertson’s Marina and, more importantly, there is some minimal sense of safety, of community.

The pan begins to boil. That is the thing with living on a boat six feet wide and fifty feet long. You always know what is happening. There is no privacy or distance or personal space like there is on bigger houseboats. Our model isn’t unique in the United States, but it is pretty rare. The godsend is that Samson manages to sleep through almost anything. He has the worst of it in many ways: right next to the kitchen on a bed that only comes into existence at nighttime. And yet he sleeps the sleep of the dead.

Drew takes out milk from the well deck at the front of the boat. We have a box out there that serves as our makeshift fridge thanks to this reliable November chill. A minute later he brings through two stained cups half full of coffee.

We sit side by side listening to the silence between us.

The coffee is hot.

“I do it for you and the boy.”

I nod.

“Not out there writing for myself. Doing it for this family. But a man needs the right conditions, Peg. I’m working on the new book, and I need it to be perfect.”

I place my hand down on his.

He flinches.

“Bathroom,” I say. “Won’t be long.”

I slide the dark wooden bathroom door and lock it and breathe out. A blessed moment of escape. The porthole window is cracked open against the condensation and I close my eyes and worry that the dream I have had all these years, of a real family, bonded together, each of us leaning on one another, protecting each other, may morph into what finally sinks us. Drew’s head is mere inches from mine on the other side of the mildewed plywood. Can he read my thoughts? Or does he seed those himself and water them till they set roots, ready for me to one day stumble over?

I wash my hands and tiptoe into the main room of the boat. In the warm glow of the fire I take in our home. Three folding Walmart camp chairs by the woodstove at the far end. His writing desk locked up securely. The steel boat doors, also locked. Our kitchen with its broken fridge. And then, closest to me, the dinette sofa and table converted into a bed containing the most precious and faultless thing in the whole wide world.

I watch him breathe.

Stardust, manifested.

I stare at him.

All the abstract love in the universe distilled into one human.

Tufts of red hair like sparks on the pillow. I bend down close to his cheek. He smells different from how he smelled as a young boy but the base notes remain. His essence. The purest scent: an aroma so powerful it makes me want to shield him with my body.

I kiss his beautiful forehead and he does not stir.

Sleep well, my boy.