A quiet reckoning. A final choice. A story that was never meant to be told-until now.

After the death of her husband, Eleanor begins the quiet work of sorting through a life. Desk drawers. Closets. Boxes in the attic. It’s the kind of grief no one sees-deliberate, methodical, and full of moments that don’t look like grief at all.

But when she finds a watch she never gave, a letter she never wrote, and a memory she never let herself name, Eleanor begins to face the truth she’s carried alone for decades: that one of her children is not her husband’s-and that she has always known.

Before the Table is the companion story to Sunday Dinner, offering the other side of the silence. Where Sunday Dinner unfolds in public, around a shared table, Before the Table is private and internal. It answers the unspoken questions: Why did she change the will? Why now? What had she been waiting for?

This is not a story about secrets. It’s about what we live with. What we carry. And what happens when someone finally makes a decision not to explain, but to be understood.