The Half-Open Door

Some secrets might destroy a marriage. Others might save it.

Howard and Alice Liu look like they have it together. A house in the suburbs, a bright five-year-old named Ernie, a tuxedo cat named Lucky, and nearly a decade of shared history. But beneath the school drop-offs and dinner routines, something has quietly come apart.

Howard is brilliant, driven, and burning out in ways he doesn't yet have words for — a first-generation Taiwanese American who has spent his whole life being told that average is failure. Placed on leave from his corporate law job and too ashamed to tell his wife, he spends his days hiding in mall food courts and movie theaters, convinced he is exactly what his boss called him: a cancer.

Alice is sharp, creative, and slowly disappearing into a life she chose but no longer recognizes — a former editor who gave up a career she'd finally fallen in love with when the math of motherhood simply didn't add up. When she meets Daniel, a quiet widowed father from the school pickup line, something in her wakes up.

What follows is not a simple story of betrayal and consequence. When the truth finally surfaces, Howard's reaction is not what either of them expected.

The Half-Open Door is a literary novel told in alternating perspectives between Howard and Alice, tracing the slow unraveling of a modern marriage and what comes after. It asks uncomfortable questions about desire, identity, and the impossible things we owe each other.

For readers of Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Sally Rooney, and Celeste Ng.