The Girl with the Thousand-Yard Stare - Stuart Maskell

When James Forester learns at age fifty that he has cancer, it rattles him so much that he randomly stops and picks up the haunted young woman he's seen standing at the bus stop for the past few months and gives her a ride. As James and the young woman, Connie, share rides more frequently, they forge an unlikely and secret friendship that offers them both a safe space to share the things they tell no one else: James tells Connie about the cancer taking over his body, and Connie tells James about the abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of those closest to her.

As the details of Connie's childhood come out and James is drawn deeper and deeper into the young woman's story, he's horrified to find a terrible connection linking their pasts. And when James introduces Connie to his wife and son, it sets off a series of events that drags painful memories from the darkest corners of the family's past into the light and changes the course of all of their futures.