A Novel · Based on True Events
The ad didn't say what the job was. She took it anyway.
A hundred strangers, a mystery contract, and two years that became a family — a funny, tender debut about the people we find when we've quietly lost track of ourselves.
The ad didn't say what the job was. It promised a background check, an immediate start, and a per diem — and to a room full of people who'd just been laid off, that was enough.
Eleni signs on with a hundred strangers for a mysterious contract that's supposed to run through the end of the year. It runs two. Somewhere between the 5 a.m. calls and the red-eyes and the far edges of the map, the hundred strangers become the closest family she's ever known.
She makes herself the one they can't do without — the confidante, the keeper of everyone's secrets. A charming colleague's affairs. A teammate who buried the person he used to be. A manager they spend months trying to bring down. Eleni manages every life but her own, and quietly files herself under "later."
But the road keeps the people who come to disappear, and it's costing her a life she keeps promising to go back to. When the family she found starts scattering back to ordinary lives, Eleni has to do the one thing two years taught her to avoid: stop disappearing, and go build a life of her own.
Based on true events — for readers of Monica Heisey's Really Good Actually and Jennifer Close's Girls in White Dresses.
Elle Rae Schaefer spent two real years as a contract "road warrior," crisscrossing the country and its farthest edges on a job she still can't fully explain. Per Diem is her debut novel, drawn from those two years.