Books/ Still Waters
Book 1 of the Ebb Tide Series
Still Waters
Some homes you inherit. Some you have to make.
Troy Hammersmith returns to his late father's house on the Florida panhandle carrying a discipline of concealment he has perfected over a career he cannot talk about. What he does not expect, in a season meant for grief, is Casey, and the slow, deliberate making of a love that has to live in code.
A Southern literary novel of the Gulf Coast in the don't-ask-don't-tell era, by Cade Morrow.
Available in print and eBook.
About the book
Troy Hammersmith comes back to the Gulf Coast house his father built, to the swept porch and the salt-iron air and the particular silence of a man who has spent his life learning not to be seen. It is the era of don't-ask-don't-tell, and Troy has made an art of saying the minimum required.
Then there is Casey, Coast Guard, steady, impossible to look away from, and the careful, dangerous arithmetic of wanting something the world has told you to keep hidden.
What follows is not a rescue but a making: two men learning each other across a season of quiet mornings and coded letters, building in the spaces between what can be said. Tender, restrained, and deeply felt, Still Waters is a love story about the courage it takes to call yourself beloved, and to stay.
Read the opening
Chapter 1
Arriving Is a Hard Way to Go
The house smells like someone else's good intentions: lemon Pledge, the ghost of burnt toast from this morning, and underneath it all, the salt-iron pull of Gulf air that never fully leaves old wood. I've been up since six. It's how I show love when I can't say it any other way. Fresh sheets. A swept porch. The mason jar on the table crammed with stargazer lilies, their smell almost obscene in a small room, because Clair always noticed flowers and I always noticed her noticing.
I've got the front porch to myself for maybe twenty more minutes. The Coors sweats in my hand, cold enough to ache. Down the stretch of highway, just cottages like this one, Dad's blueprints living on in other men's variations, a horn sounds two blocks out. Cream Buick, on time for once. I set the beer on the railing and feel the late afternoon go golden on my forearms.
My father built this place before I was born, thirty-seven years old and fully alive. I was six when he wasn't anymore. I've never stopped doing the math on that. What I also never stopped doing: remembering wearing Clair's pink polka-dot one-piece in the side yard, the afternoon he found me. His face went soft in a way I've spent twenty-five years trying to read backward. It looked like the beginning of something, a door opening onto a conversation we never got to finish. He died before I could hand him the thread, and I've been holding it ever since, this whole coiled thing I've never unspooled for anyone.
The Ebb Tide Series
Still Waters is the first novel in the Ebb Tide Series, a Gulf Coast trilogy following Troy Hammersmith across two decades of love, concealment, and chosen family in the don't-ask-don't-tell era and after. Told in Troy's retrospective first-person voice, the series moves from the making of a hidden life through its testing to its final reckoning: three books on what it costs, and what it is worth, to be fully seen.
- 1. Still Waters
- 2. Landfall
- 3. Slack Water
See the whole series on the Books page
Book details
- Author Cade Morrow
- Series Ebb Tide, Book 1
- Genre Southern literary fiction, LGBTQ+ fiction
- Setting Florida panhandle, Gulf Coast
- Length About 69,000 words, 10 chapters
If you like
Interior, restrained literary fiction that privileges the unsaid over plot, set in a vividly specific American place. Readers of André Aciman's Call Me by Your Name and Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You will recognize the slow Gulf Coast atmosphere and the first-person reticence of a narrator who reveals himself only obliquely.
About the author
Cade Morrow writes Southern literary fiction about men navigating love, identity, and the long shadow of lives kept quiet. His work is set along the Gulf Coast and the Deep South, in south Mississippi, rural Alabama, and Mobile Bay, and his Ebb Tide trilogy follows two military officers across twenty years of a relationship the country would not allow them to name. Read more about Cade.
Start with Still Waters.
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