The Vanishing Half

by Brit Bennett

“She’ll never stop! Your girl will keep trying to tell mine the truth and it’s too late for all that now. Can’t you see that?” “Oh sure, it’s the end of the world. Your girl finding out she ain’t so lily white—” “That I lied to her,” Stella said. “She’ll never forgive me.

IN THE BEGINNING, Early Jones could never fall asleep in the Vignes house. The comfort disturbed him. He was used to sleeping under the stars or cramped in his car or lying on a hard prison cot. Or before all that, piled on a mattress stuffed with Spanish moss, beside eight of his siblings, whose names he no longer remembered, let alone their faces.