Becoming Elias: A Water Kept Novel

"The night I first met Marcus Vale, the dead were coming out of the ground."Thirteen-year-old Eli Reyes knows what a hurricane can uncover.Floodwater. Graves. Things people thought were safely buried.And one man who should not be there.What happens that night in Port Mercy should have ended when the water went down.It doesn't.Years pass. Lives change. Names acquire meanings they did not have before. And somewhere beneath the people we become are the choices, debts, loyalties, and secrets that helped make us.But who gets to decide what another human being becomes?The people who love us?The people who help us?The people who need something from us?Or the truths we would rather leave buried?BECOMING ELIAS is an atmospheric, emotionally charged literary novel about identity, family, ambition, hidden influence, and the dangerous difference between being helped-and being claimed.Some things the water returns were never meant to stay buried.