HALF-KNOWN

When Eli Calloway's mother dies after a years-long illness, she leaves behind more than grief. In a box of her belongings, he finds adoption paperwork with a name on it that shouldn't be there.
A DNA test leads him to Raymond - a careful, measured man who says he might be Eli's uncle. Raymond connects him to a woman who presents herself warmly, who asks about his kids, who says she always wondered. Who says she is his aunt.
She is not his aunt.
What follows is a year of locked doors and open ones - a biological mother who looked him in the eye and lied, then chose permanent silence when the truth surfaced; and on the other side of the family tree, a father already dead, an uncle who tells the story of how he died with a rueful laugh, and a jawline Eli finally recognizes in a photograph.
Half-Known is a novel about the grief that has no script - mourning a father you never knew, raging at a mother who is alive but unreachable, and learning to carry the weight of a history that is yours whether you wanted it or not. It is about the family that chose you and the family that didn't, and what it means to belong to both at once.
Some questions don't get answered. Some doors stay locked.
You learn to live in the hallway.