The author’s debut novel hits shelves next fall
Credit: Scott Koenig; McSweeney’s
NEED TO KNOW
- PEOPLE can share an exclusive excerpt from Devon Halliday’s debut novel To Stay, To Stay, To Stay
- The novel follows the residents of an Ohio college town over one eventful week
- The book has been longlisted for the Center for Fiction 2026 First Novel Prize
An unlikely group of people star in Devon Halliday’s debut novel.
To Stay, To Stay, To Stay, out next fall from McSweeney’s, is set in an Ohio college town called Eden. Taking place over an eventful summer week, the novel follows seven of Eden’s residents — including a realtor, a baker, a gardener, a poet and an artist — as they reach their own respective limits amongst the heat.
To Stay, To Stay, To Stay was longlisted for the Center for Fiction 2026 First Novel Prize, with the synopsis calling it, “a mosaic portrait of love and its close substitutes.”
Read an exclusive excerpt from To Stay, To Stay, To Stay below.
Credit: McSweeney’s
Dig
If you were a lost wedding ring, here are the places you might choose to tuck yourself away on a Monday afternoon.
You’re a symbolic object, a wedding ring, and so you will probably want to hide somewhere equally symbolic. This means you’ll skip all the ordinary places one would expect to find you: the ledge by the shower, the ring dish by the kitchen sink, the nightstand, the floor under the nightstand. You could hide in the jewelry box, just to be perverse. Anyone would be confused to find you nestled in there among all the other less-symbolic jewelry. Have I been taking my marriage for granted? they might wonder. Have I lost sight of what’s important? Of course, most of the other jewelry is likely to be a gift from the same spouse, so the symbolism of your hiding place will probably be lost, written off as an honest mistake: ah here’s the wedding ring, safe with all love’s other precious mementos, how silly of me. Better choose somewhere else.
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The floor is good — the floor just about anywhere. The smooth gold of the ring all clotted with dust and shed hair, very poignant. Or somewhere odd like a bookshelf, slipped between the pages of an unread novel. Glinting from deep within the sink drain, if you’re feeling particularly cruel. Careful not to choose one of those garbage-disposal sinks. The point is to eventually get found; it’s not symbolic of anything if you just vanish off the earth, ground up and bent and disfigured in the depths of some landfill.
With that said, you also don’t want to get found too quickly. If you’re found quickly, it allows almost no time for existential grappling; any nearly reached conclusions will be dismissed and forgotten by the relieved searcher. You’ve got to stay lost long enough for some resolutions to form. They won’t be kept, of course. Resolutions are very small bursts of light, doomed to fade. But by that point you can always tuck yourself away again somewhere else: deep in the couch cushions; at the murky, pebbly bottom of the pool; under the dark rows of movie theater seats; mysteriously wound into the tangled ends of the bedsheets, appearing as if by magic when the sheets are changed, plinging suddenly across the room and rolling to a stop under the dusty bed frame. The wonderful and mystifying thing about resolutions is that people never seem to tire of making them.
Wherever you are, burrow down deep. It’s going to be a long stakeout. You deserve to be a little smug, at this point. You picture their face when they finally find you. The relief, and the guilt, and the recognition. You can make a difference, disappearing like this, if you time it right, if you pick the right hiding place. You watch them reach deep, far, underneath, their hand covered in the grimy dust of neglected places, straining, reaching. You only get to use this trick so many times. It’s the only trick you have. Edge a little closer to, or farther from, their fingertips, and pray you got it right.
Credit: Scott Koenig
Nicole checks the bathroom, the marble vanity top and the shampoo ledge of the shower, and the medicine cabinet just in case the taking of this morning’s pills coincided with some lapse in sanity. She checks the floor there and the floor back in the bedroom (the dust under the bed is smooth, hiding nothing) and the wooden floors of the hallway in between. It would not be the end of the world to have lost the ring; they can afford another. She returns to the kitchen and checks the ceramic ring bowl again. The bowl is a dark mottled teal, unevenly glazed, something she picked up for a few euros abroad, she can’t remember where and it doesn’t match the one upstairs, whose edges fan out like a seashell, rose flecked with gold. She takes the ring off to shower, sometimes to wash dishes if it’s the skillet she’s scrubbing at, and she takes it off before bed. The ring is a gold band woven around the diamonds from their engagement ring, and those diamonds came from a ring worn by Seth’s grandmother. It’s not really hers to lose, is how Nicole feels about the ring.
She checks the kitchen countertops and peers underneath the toaster. Nicole is careful with the ring; there are really only three places it could be, and she remains confused about why it’s not in any of them. She checks the pockets of yesterday’s jeans. She checks the cushions of each of the couches, including the ones neither she nor Seth ever sits on and finds the usual trove of quarters and hair ties and pens, which she assembles on the coffee table as she goes. She mentioned to Seth last night that she’d misplaced the ring, but she made it seem like not a big deal, like she hadn’t looked very hard. She opens the rolling cabinets of trash and recycling and looks down into the plastic folds of each bag, but the cleaning people always take their trash to the bins outside before they leave, and so both bags are nearly empty, a couple of tissues, a twist tie. She checks the compost bin and even digs beneath this morning’s coffee grounds through the onion and garlic skins of yesterday, but besides a few moldy smears of what might once have been yogurt, there’s nothing at the bottom of the bin.
Nicole stands motionless in the kitchen’s center. She knows what the next step is, if she’s going to keep looking. The next step is to dig through yesterday’s trash. It’s possible that, while wiping off her hands between one stage of cooking and another, scrubbing off the counter, somehow … She takes her raincoat off the hook and finds her waterproof boots (slipping her feet in sockless) and opens the front door. The rain is deafening right away, gray and pounding and relentless.
Nicole dodges and sprints and lifts the mouth of the garbage bin to find the desired trash bag wet and slumped at the base, a slug suctioned to the rim of the bin as she tries to lift the trash bag clear without brushing her hand against the slug, gross, gross and she returns not to the house but to the garage, not wanting to track muddy water all over the floor for the second time today, especially since the cleaning people won’t be around till next Tuesday. She keys in the four-digit date of their anniversary and ducks into the musty dark of the garage. Her clothes are irredeemably damp. She turns on the overhead bulb to ensure there are no further slugs associated with the trash bag. Coast clear. The cleaning people have tied the bag especially tight; she ends up having to tear it open. Oh well, if she finds the ring at least …
The topmost scrum of the trash is soggy. A battalion of crunched-up greasy paper towels, a few torn envelopes, produce stickers pinched to the sides of the trash bag, an empty bottle of Windex (should that have gone in the recycling?), inside-out plastic gloves and then another stratum of paper towels and she’s getting toward the remains of yesterday, an empty mesh bag, a few extra scraps of garlic skins, the creased slightly bloody packet the beef came in, three or four used tissues, an empty bag of espresso grounds, the cork from a bottle of wine Seth must have finished, a few damp smashed teabags, a clot of old rubber bands, or no wait she finished that wine when she used it for cooking, a discarded expired hot sauce, the slimy black sleeve of Saturday’s salmon, a few fluttering Post-its, junk mail from Spectrum, a crushed paper bag, a corroded battery zipped into a Ziploc (definitely not supposed to be in the trash but she can’t remember where instead it should go), junk mail from Capital One, paper towels again…
Nicole is compelled enough by the archaeological dig that she forgets at times to check for the ring, and then she has to go back through and unravel all the paper towels one by one. The exercise feels essentially futile — the ring isn’t going to be in the trash — but she doesn’t know where to look if it’s not here. She sits back and moves to check her phone and then remembers that she left it inside.
Seth will not blame her for losing the ring, will write it off, as she will, as one of life’s minor mysteries. It is not really worth going through the whole house on hands and knees, searching through crevices and shining her phone flashlight in between the bars of the heating vents — but this is in fact what she does, a kind of hysterical superstition rising with the passing of each hour. She knows she was wearing the ring the night before last, because she remembers turning it around her finger that night at dinner, slipping the ring back and forth across the knuckle, idly, the way she does sometimes, and so she checks the whole perimeter of the kitchen floor, including the two-inch space behind the refrigerator that not even crumbs can get to, and then she checks the laundry room and the washing machine, even though she hasn’t done the laundry all week, and the pockets of all the dirty clothes and the revoltingly cobwebbed crack between the washing machine and the wall, and then back upstairs to the kitchen, and the living room, and the bedroom, retracing her steps, pointlessly — she has already forgone any hope that the ring might be found easily, someplace normal.
In fact, Nicole is convinced that the ring was lost yesterday evening, when against her better judgment she answered a phone call from Chris. This seems both practically and symbolically plausible — that the ring blinked out of existence sometime mid-conversation, and that it therefore can’t be found anywhere in the whole of the house in physical form, but that it could reappear if she only promised: to do what? To honor her marriage, to stop flirting with exes, to make peace with boredom, with stillness, to make an actual go of life in Eden and not just resent and endure it. She makes these promises before digging her hand into another unlikely portal. If I find it here, I will stop texting Chris. If I find it here and he texts me, I will not text back.
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The rain is still going when she ends up back in the garage, round two on the trash, not bothering this time to keep her hands clean, shaking all the paper towels out, sorting the trash into piles from unchecked to checked. At the bottom of the bag is the salmon pouch with its overwhelming salty smell — she peels it open, checks both sides of the gold cardboard backing, tosses it over, checked — and underneath that is the shrink-wrapped package that held the ground beef, a scrim of blood circling the bubbled edges of the plastic, and Nicole thinks, This would be the time to give up, if I was going to give up. Instead she slips most of a hand in and there’s the ring, tucked in a crumpled corner, lightly sticky.
It takes a while to bag all the trash back up and wash the ring thoroughly enough that she can wear it without feeling still a little skeeved out. She sits on the couch with her intensely clean hands and her charging laptop. It’s 6:12 p.m. She feels her whole life washing over her. It’s not a bad feeling; she waits as the pieces of herself settle back into place. Seth will be home soon. They will have dinner. He will ask about her day, and she will narrate the search for the ring, the dramatic eleventh-hour discovery at the bottom of the trash bag. She will not attempt to capture the eerie feeling she had of fault, of her implication in some cosmic scheme of guilt and punishment. She will express how relieved she is to have found it. It really is a beautiful ring. She will remind him of when he gave it to her, the proposal, Corsica, new moon over the dark water. She will ask him how the day went, his board meeting? She will be grateful. She will try to hold on to that feeling, stay grateful as long as she can.
Excerpted from To Stay, To Stay, To Stay: A Novel by Devon Halliday. © 2026 Published by McSweeney’s, October 27, 2026. All Rights Reserved.
To Stay, To Stay, To Stay will be published on Oct. 27, 2026 and is now available for preorder, wherever books are sold.
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