After the Fall

After the Fall: A Novel of a Fallen Shepherd and the Road Back

He had a pulpit, a family, and a name people trusted. The bottle took all three.

For eighteen years, Caleb Ward pastored Grace Community Church — preaching grace on Sundays and hiding bottles by Friday. When the drinking finally cost him everything, the elders offered him a road back. His pride refused it. He lost the church, then Ruth, then his daughter's voice on the phone, then a year he barely remembers, ending on the stairs of a roadside motel.

Now Caleb works the night shift as a janitor at Harbor House, the treatment center where he got sober — mopping the floors of the rooms where men like him sit in circles, attending meetings as a nobody. It is the first honest work he has done in years.

Then a new resident recognizes him. And the past Caleb has been quietly outrunning walks through the front door of the only safe place he has left.

After the Fall is a novel about the long, unglamorous road back: a sponsor who calls it fleeing, a prayer stumbled through on a cold porch at 2 a.m., amends that cost more than apologies, a church that failed him in some ways and carried him in others — and a man learning that being restored doesn't always mean getting the old life back. Sometimes it means picking up a mop, setting the chairs in a circle, and staying.

Honest about alcoholism without glamorizing it. Faithful about grace without preaching at you. For anyone in recovery, anyone who loves someone in recovery, and anyone who has ever had to start over in the same town that watched them fall.

Steven Lavoie writes recovery fiction drawn from the rooms, the meetings, and the mercy he has seen there.

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