The Asheville Seat

A Novel About a Struggling Trader, a Ghost Who Taught Him to Invest, and the Legend Waiting on the Other Side of It

By: James Farris

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Every morning, Caleb Mercer walks onto a trading floor where a wall of names and numbers tells him exactly how much he's worth — and lately, the number beside his name has been red.

He's drowning in a way no one at the office can see: a bounced credit card payment, a wife picking up weekend shifts to cover the gap, and a boss who makes examples of people in front of the whole desk. Then, one midnight in an empty stairwell, he meets a man who shouldn't be there.

The man calls himself Gus. He talks like no one Caleb has ever met — unhurried, certain, a little dangerous — and he offers to teach Caleb something the trading floor never will: how to tell the difference between a company's price and its actual worth. In exchange, Caleb has to keep him a secret.

What starts as one quiet lesson in an abandoned stairwell becomes an education that will carry Caleb further than he ever expected — toward a legend everyone at his firm has heard whispered about but no one has ever actually seen: the Asheville Seat, the one name on the board no one has ever earned the right to sit beneath.

But the closer Caleb gets to the truth of who Gus really is, the more he understands that some lessons cost more than a credit card bill — and some debts aren't paid in money at all.