How To Catch A Unicorn

Eli loved Anne the way a collector loves. He noticed everything: how she took her coffee, which way the plates faced in her dishwasher, how long she needed her silences to last. He wrote it all down in a notebook and called it devotion. What he never did was ask her a single question that started with why. So she left, gently, which was worse, and Eli added one more numbered entry to the notebook, because that was the kind of man he was.

Everything was a sign to him. A song in a grocery store. A wrong number. Then, months later, a cardboard box arrived with no note: a worn stuffed unicorn, one horn bent, and a smell he couldn't name. A year after that, his mama died, and Eli went home to her house in the coal fields of Williamson, West Virginia, the house nobody has lived in since, the house that goes sad if somebody doesn't stay in it. He is thirty-eight years old. His feet hang off the twin bed. The pipes knock when the heat comes up, and he is learning, slowly, the difference between a knock and a message.

He thinks he came home to heal. Then Anne comes to town.

How to Catch a Unicorn is a grown-up love story about attention mistaken for love, the traps we build out of caring, and what it costs to finally set down the rope. It stands on its own, but if you know Into the Light, you already know these hills.

The unicorn was never caught. It only ever chose.