The Neutral Ground

Ten years ago, the love of his life walked out. Tonight, he walked back in - with a husband.

Ellis Moreau has owned The Neutral Ground, a piano bar on Royal Street in the French Quarter, for ten years - ten years of sticking his neck out for nobody. Then the rain brings Jonah Reyes back through his door: the man who vanished a decade ago without a word, now married to Theo Lindqvist, an investigative journalist with dangerous men on his trail and a story that could bring down a private military contractor.

Jonah and Theo need to disappear, and Ellis is the one man who can make it happen. But every hour they hide in his bar drags the past back into the room - the summer they were everything to each other, the note that said forgive me, the ten years of silence in between. Theo's marriage to Jonah is real, and Ellis can see it. Which only makes the choice harder.

Built on the emotional architecture of Casablanca, with a wholly original story, The Neutral Ground is literary fiction about love, loyalty, and the cost of letting go. Set against a New Orleans hurricane, it asks what remains when choosing the person you love means giving him up. Bittersweet and quietly devastating, this is a novel about the courage required not to possess love, but to release it.