Half-Raised
He was the man you’d never worry about.
On his fiftieth birthday, one notification told him where his wife really was, and the night ended on a bathroom floor. But the night wasn't the beginning. The beginning was a stolen two-year-old, a name that was never his, and a father out there looking for a son who'd been erased.
Prologue It begins on the floor.
Start where the book starts. The opening pages of Half-Raised, exactly as they're printed. Read them and you'll know within a page whether this is your kind of book. Highlight any line to share it.
The tile is colder than tile is supposed to be. I'm face down on it, my right cheek against the floor.
I'm not getting up. That isn't a decision I'm making. It's just a fact, the same as the cold is a fact.
My eyes are open. The grout line runs away from my face toward the bathtub. There's a sock on the tile two feet from me and I have no idea how I got out of it. The light over the sink is on, humming. The cabinet above the sink is open. The bottle is on its side on the counter, and some of what was inside it is in my left hand.
I don't have the walk from the office to the bathroom. I don't have opening the bottle. There's a moment in front of the mirror that I half remember, and the moment ends in front of the mirror, and the next thing the body has is the tile.
You'll notice I say the body. I'm going to keep saying it, because it's the only true way to tell this part. The man wasn't driving. Hold on to that.
My left arm is somewhere I can't see. My right knee is bent under me. There's a wet patch on the front of my shirt and I don't know what put it there. The cold has come up through the cotton and settled into the muscle along my ribs, and it isn't going anywhere, and neither am I.
The hand stays closed. I can't tell if it has been closed since I went down or if it closed just now. I can't lift my head to see what's left on the counter, and I'm not going to tell you what the label said, not now and not ever. The label isn't the story. The hand is the story, what it did and what it didn't do, and I'll get there, but not tonight.
If you had met me that afternoon, you'd have called me fine. Everybody did. Six feet tall. Quiet. Built like a Viking, full white beard and all. Fifty years old that very day. Steady income. Just built his family's dream home. A family he loved more than anything. Nobody looks at a man like that and sees this floor coming. I want that said before anything else gets said, for the sake of whoever you know that seems fine, for the sake of you, if you're the one who seems fine. Nobody walks into this room in one night. You get walked here a year at a time by things with patient hands. The walking looks so much like ordinary life that the man doing it is always the last to see where the road was headed.
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Sign up to keep readingFifty years, traced back to the floor.
It took me six years to gather enough of myself, through the pain, to write this book. These are the six turns of the book's arc, the ones the story hinges on. Tap one and sit with me inside it, what it actually felt like, in my own words.
The Floor
A fiftieth birthday that ended on cold tile and the thing in the room that would not let go.
In the Mind of Bill → 02The Stolen Name
Taken at two. A surname changed with no court, no adoption.
In the Mind of Bill → 03Frank’s House
Ninety seconds at the door. Learning love was something you earned by causing no trouble.
In the Mind of Bill → 04Three Cages
Lisa. Renee. Megan. Three marriages that were, underneath, the same.
In the Mind of Bill → 05Row Eleven
A father who searched, found him in the stands, and didn’t survive it.
In the Mind of Bill → 06The Awakening
A pen picked up at fifty. The chain finally named.
In the Mind of Bill →Hi, I’m Bill.
I write a bit of everything. Made-up stories, sure, but mostly I write about how people actually work. The overthinking. The patterns we get stuck in. The stuff I learned the hard way by living it. I dipped my toe in with a short piece about what it's like to live with a narcissist, because I'd done it and had something to say, and I haven't stopped since. I've got a couple of books going right now, one of them about overthinking, the way a mind chews on itself at three in the morning. I'd do all of it whether anybody read a word or not.
Half-Raised is different. It's the first thing I've ever written that I didn't get to make up. After years of made-up people and other people's patterns, writing my own story all the way down is a whole different animal. There's nowhere to hide. You can't rewrite a character to be braver or fix a scene so it lands cleaner. It happened the way it happened, and the only job is to have the guts to put it down straight.
Notes from the desk
The book is the wound. These are the notes from after. Shorter and rougher. Some pulled from years of scribbled notes, some just what I'm thinking lately, some things I've learned the hard way.
The smell of a safe room
What came into the bathroom that night, and why I stopped trying to explain it away.
Read the entry → 02On calling control “love”
Three marriages taught me the same lesson. I just kept refusing to read it.
Read the entry → 03Why I waited until fifty to write this
For decades the book sat in me like a stone I had learned to walk around. Here is what finally made it impossible to keep quiet.
Read the entry →
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