Elijah is twenty years old and running out of chances. A shoplifting charge, two jobs lost to his own anger, and a home life that his mother and sister have been quietly managing around him for years. When a woman from the Department of Corrections contacts Laura about an alternative program, she says no. Then she finds what is hidden in her son’s room, and she calls back.

What follows is not what any of them expected.

Practitioners Connie and Felicia have seen this before: the anger that is not really anger, the chaos that is really a very long search for something specific and not yet found. Their program is structured and unconventional, and it works, though not always in the ways anyone predicts. For Elijah, it opens questions he has never had language for, about who he is, what he needs, and what he has been trying to become underneath everything else.

Elijah’s Ultimatum is a novel about regression, identity, and the unlikely things that can look like healing from the outside. It is about a family that breaks apart and finds itself, in the end, closer than it has ever been. And it is about a baby who needed to be born twice.