Excerpt from Make Your Way Home by Carrie R. Moore, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Which was the end of the story, as far as it went, Ever Roberts III tells the woman sitting across from him on the restaurant patio. Except to say that Elijah was his third-great-grandfather, and it is still a story his family tells from time to time.

He has talked for longer than he'd have liked, but Amari, whom he'd like to call his woman, has asked him to share a family story, and he will do anything to keep her here. They're on the patio of a barbecue spot off Cesar Chavez, the restaurant packed on a Friday night. He can't stop trying to memorize her face. Her twists hang in a long ponytail, the strands fine and dark and numerous, like the night behind her is still dripping, not yet dried.

"Can't imagine my father telling me something like that," she says, tugging on her neckerchief. "Be too easy to believe it, as a child."

"I think he was scared somebody else would tell it if he didn't. He always wanted to frame things for my sister and me."

"But as a doctor, he should've known better. Kids and their impressionable minds."

"You could say that."

He doesn't mention that his father told the story the year of his divorce from their mother. His father had made tofu burgers, sat him and his twin, Leela, at the dining table in their old home off Chicon. The place felt too large in their mother's absence. They could sense her new duplex in Hyde Park, off in the distance. "I don't believe in it," their father had said, a strange smudge on his glasses, "but I wanted you to hear."

At the restaurant, the ceiling fans whir overhead. Amari swats a fly and says, "Well, I'm looking forward to meeting your old man. And everybody."

He mops sauce with his white bread. "You say that now."

"Seriously. The longer I stay, the less it feels like I've been talking to a ghost all this time."

He knows what she means. She's been in his city only an hour, coming to him in the bus station light before he drove them here. Yet the longer she talks and pulls the pickled onions from her brisket sandwich, the more he can match this person in front of him with the woman he's messaged online for three years. Back then, she'd posted in all caps on Reddit, PLS, DOES ANYONE DO EMERGENCY WEB DESIGN? and he'd responded, assembling her home page and listing her publications ahead of her job interview with a major DC newspaper. He'd gotten sucked into her writing, the windows of her life appearing on his screen some thirteen hundred miles away: Only child. Former Park View resident. Howard alum. Her city had grown less familiar to her, she wrote, but she loved it still, like a troubled cousin sure to get himself together someday.

Read your work, Ever had messaged her. Place means something to you, huh?

She'd responded: Says the guy with his area code in his username. From there, from their shared profiles and eventual video chats, he'd learned that other things mattered to her too. Like volunteering with her sorors or buying her parents an elaborate cruise for their twenty-fifth anniversary or bussing everywhere instead of flying, so she could see where she was in the world. She went months thinking he was named after Medgar Evers, then realized Ever was his grandfather's name, his father's too. Sometimes, he thought they both found it easier to grow intimate with someone partially an illusion, a mirage conjured up by screen and code and careful curation. They'd held each other down through boyfriends who called her out of her name and girlfriends who asked him to pack his things. Through insur-gents storming the Capitol twenty minutes from her apartment. Through his grandfather's move to the memory care facility. He'd turned twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one. She remained always ahead of him, two years older. Most recently, he'd talked her through her layoff from that newspaper where she'd once been so eager to work.

This break is why she's here, his guest on this April weekend of his sister's wedding. They have three days to see who they are to each other at a breath's distance.

Excerpted from Make Your Way Home by Carrie R. Moore. Reprinted with permission from Tin House/Zando. Copyright © 2025 by Carrie R. Moore