TWO MILES APART

Josh Dolan is nineteen, cleaning the library tower on the night shift to pay for college, when he finds nursing student Emily Lanier asleep over a pharmacology textbook at three in the morning with a nosebleed. The middle name on her student ID is one he last heard through a kitchen door in Winston-Salem, in the weeks after his father died in a trench collapse.

Emily grew up two miles from his mother’s rented house, behind a stone wall in Buena Vista. Her father, developer Whit Lanier, has Josh investigated, offers him sixty-five thousand dollars to walk away, and tells him to his face that hard work will never be enough to get through his door.

Josh marries her anyway. Then his dying mother hands him the envelope she hid for fourteen years: the settlement that bought her silence after his father was killed on a Lanier jobsite. It is signed by Whit Lanier himself.

With a son on the way, Josh goes looking for the men who were there: the foreman who asked three times for the shoring box, and the federal inspector whose report was rewritten over his head. The family lawyer threatens his sister’s college money. A reporter wants the story in time to sink a $290 million deal. And Emily, who has found her own piece of what her family knew, is carrying a pregnancy that turns dangerous every time the truth gets closer.

TWO MILES APART is a Southern family novel about love across the line between old money and working people, a buried lie, and what it costs to make a powerful man say a dead man’s name out loud.