TOGETHER: CLEAN AND SOBER

Jesse Tate had a shortstop’s arm and a ticket out of Clay Hill, North Carolina, until a catcher’s knee tore his shoulder apart and a bottle of sixty pain pills took the rest.

Sara Bell took her first pill from her mother’s medicine cabinet to quiet a fear she’d carried since she was a little girl. By the time her tire goes flat in a river-bottom driveway, the pills have turned to heroin, and the young tire man who fixes it for free is in deeper than she is.

They fall in love on the same poison. Then fentanyl comes to town. On a March night in a highway motel, Sara stops breathing while Jesse is out, and when he gets back he has one dose of Narcan, one phone, and a warrant with his name on it.

He calls. She lives. He’s arrested in the hospital hallway.

Sent to separate programs with no contact, each has to get well alone. Jesse detoxes on a jail floor and splits firewood on a twelve-month work farm. Sara wakes from a ventilator and learns, for the first time, the name of the fear she has carried all her life. Neither knows if the other will still be alive, or still be the person they loved, when it’s over.

What follows is years of hard, ordinary courage: a list of rules taped inside a kitchen cabinet, a phone call before sundown, a funeral, a relapse, a baby, and two people who pick each other up every time one of them goes down.

Told in both their voices, TOGETHER: CLEAN AND SOBER is an unflinching and deeply hopeful Southern novel about addiction, recovery, and the kind of love that stays.