Excerpted from HANDLE WITH CARE by Marybeth Mayhew Whalen:
Just then the door to the post office opens and they all turn to see a woman walking in, her arms full of a large basket wrapped in cellophane and tied with a huge bow. The woman is so focused on managing the basket that she doesn’t notice what is going on at the front of the room. She doesn’t notice anything until Tommy turns the gun on her. He runs toward her, yelling, “Get the hell out of here!”
Seeing Tommy coming at her, gun drawn, the woman drops the basket and runs out, shrieking. The basket crashes to the floor and the cellophane pops open on impact. The contents spill out over the floor, and Tommy has to do some fancy footwork to miss tripping over the items, which is pretty remarkable considering his level of intoxication. But he continues chasing the woman, who gets away before he can reach the door.
Muttering a string of expletives, Tommy shuts the door that leads out to the vestibule. He pushes a large display of greeting cards in front of the door, then reaches for another display case, this one smaller and full of travel brochures. He attempts to pull a heavier cabinet full of mailing supplies over, but it is too heavy and he only pulls it halfway before giving up. As he does, the women register a shift in the situation: He is barricading them in.
With Tommy’s attention focused elsewhere, the woman who’d been on the phone turns and bolts toward the back, darting behind the partition that Sylvie had been trying to see past earlier. The other four women follow her lead. But she has a head start, and she is fast. She wasn’t lying about all those workouts. All that protein consumption has clearly served her well.
As she runs, Sylvie hears the blood pound in her ears. She is amazed at the strength of her beating heart, at the ability of her legs to carry her. She would not have thought herself capable of such a feat at her age. But here she is, running alongside women much younger than her. We can, she thinks as the doors that lead outside open wide, the daylight streaming through, do a lot of things we don’t think we can do. She hears Tommy calling for them to stop, but they just keep running through the warehouse area, her eyes intent on the letters E-X-I-T over the double doors at the back of the building.
Blythe hears the gunshot at the same moment a bullet whizzes past her head and the doors close behind the woman on the phone, who has gotten away. The bullet hits the exit sign, cracking it as pieces of glass rain to the floor. The four remaining women stop in their tracks, staring at the mosaic of shards on the floor between them and the now-closed doors.
Tommy reaches them and walks across the glass, which crunches under his boots until he comes to a stop in front of them. The exit is behind him, only a few feet away. But they will not be getting out through it now.
Excerpted from HANDLE WITH CARE by Marybeth Mayhew Whalen. © 2026 by Marybeth Mayhew Whalen, used with permission from.
HANDLE WITH CARE by Marybeth Mayhew Whalen
Narrator: Jane Oppenheimer
A Novel
Three women walk into a post office. This is no joke–it’s the spark that ignites a life-altering hostage crisis.
On a quiet spring afternoon, an ordinary small-town post office becomes ground zero for a domestic dispute. A husband draws a weapon and seals the doors, holding four hostages captive: his terrified wife, a young woman searching for meaning amid uncertainty, a mother on the brink of letting go as her only daughter graduates, and an elderly woman concealing a secret that could shatter everything she knows.
Outside, the negotiator works to keep a fragile peace, forced to confront her own baggage as every word becomes a lifeline.
Each of the three women who walked into the post office is carrying something that, if mailed, would profoundly change her life. As minutes become hours in this daylong siege, these strangers forge lasting bonds.
Handle with Care shines a light on hope found even in the darkest moments, and illuminates how even strangers, thrown together by chance and hardship, have the power to change each other’s lives.
Women’s Fiction Southern | Thriller Domestic [ Thomas Nelson, On Sale: April 14, 2026, Paperback / e-Book / audiobook, ISBN: 9781400345052 / eISBN: 9781400345069 ]
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About Marybeth Mayhew Whalen
Marybeth Mayhew Whalen is the author of five previous novels and speaks to women’s groups around the United States. She is the cofounder of the popular women’s fiction site She Reads and is active in a local writers’ group. Marybeth and her husband, Curt, have been married for twenty-four years and are the parents of six children, ranging from young adult to elementary age. The family lives in North Carolina. Marybeth spends most of her time in the grocery store but occasionally escapes long enough to scribble some words. She is always at work on her next novel.
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