Everything We Chased

Sebastian Vance learned what it feels like to be let go at nine years old, watching his father come home carrying a white box.

He spent the next thirty years becoming the man on the other side of that conversation - the one who tells you the organization has made a decision about your future inside of it. Then an eight-year marriage takes everything he thought he'd built and leaves him above a dry cleaner, seeing his daughter four days a month.

He meets Dara, who came from Italy at twenty-two with two suitcases and has spent fifteen years making certain she never wakes up in a life somebody else can take away from her.

They came out of the same nothing. They want exactly the same things. They just can't get there on the same clock.

Two years in, he puts a ring on the table. She loves him, and she can't pick it up. She has spent a month trying to picture the life they would build, and she can see all of it except herself in it.

He doesn't think love is something you wait for a man to earn. She doesn't think you build a life on somebody's potential. Neither of them is wrong.

Eleven months later a bet he made when he had nothing finally comes in, and Sebastian becomes exactly the man she needed.

By then she's with somebody else.

Everything We Chased lives at the messy intersection of pride, class, timing, and the transactions people make in the name of security and love. It is a story about two people who are entirely human - flawed, not always honest with themselves, and fighting hard for a life they can call their own.

"...there is magic in the moments when the author pins down closely-observed details of human behavior..." - Kirkus Reviews