Back to the Fire

Marcus Cole is standing at the grill when his sister brings her new boyfriend around the side of the house. Desmond Price is tall, charming, and carries a bottle of wine in each hand like a man who always has a reservation. Naomi hasn't looked this happy in a year. Marcus files the evening under "good news" and goes back to his ribs.
Six months later, Naomi flinches when Desmond reaches for the salt.
Told entirely from Marcus's perspective, Back to the Fire is the story of a Black family in Seattle navigating the slow crisis of domestic violence — not from the survivor's point of view, but from the people around her who love her and fail her and learn, painfully, how to do better. Marcus must confront the limits of his own strength, the silence he inherited from his father, and the devastating truth that love without education is just force with good intentions.
Through a support group on Rainier Avenue, a social worker girlfriend who sees what he can't, and a mother whose confession rewrites everything he thought he knew about his family, Marcus learns that saving his sister was never his job. Being the door she could walk through — that was the work.
Back to the Fire is a novel about the question everyone asks and no one can answer simply: why didn't she just leave?