The Distance Between Us

Mark Calloway is seventeen, brilliant at mathematics, and disappearing. For two years, since the divorce that split his family into two houses and zero homes, he has sat in the last row of Room 204 — the boy in the black hoodie who never takes it off, who stares at equations he no longer solves, who exists in the grey zone between waking and absence. His body is failing. His mind is failing. And no one has noticed. Not his father, Richard, who works sixty hours a week and believes that presence is a substitute for attention. Not his mother, Elena, who walked away and told herself her son was old enough to understand. Not his teachers, who see the perfect test scores and miss the hollow cheeks, the shaking hands, that the hoodie hides. When Mark collapses in the middle of class, the silence that follows is the loudest sound anyone has ever heard. The hospital reveals what the family refused to see: severe depression, anorexia nervosa, self-harm. The boy who was "fine" is not fine. He has not been fine for a long time. The Distance Between Us is the story of what happens after the fall. It is the story of Richard, who must learn to be a father instead of a provider, who must sit in silence he does not know how to fill, who must hold his son through fever and vomit and the word no that means please stay