After December

Tony is dead. He killed himself Monday night. Three thousand miles away. Brian Listo is going home.

Five days. Four best friends who don’t forgive him. Three women who can’t stand him. Two parents who don’t trust him. One unforgivable sin he can’t hide from anymore. Brian is back in Virginia despite the craters he left at New Year’s. Back to eat crow. To beg forgiveness. To explain himself to anyone who will listen. Except the one person who can no longer hear him. Growing up, Tony always covered for Brian, made even his most heinous sins seem like minor infractions. But without Tony to play defense, Brian must learn to apologize. It’s time to come clean. Can he earn forgiveness? Does he deserve it? Or does he just need a clean break? Like Ethan Hawke’s The Hottest State, After December catches a young man enjoying the peak of his greed while the most important part of his life falls apart. Brian’s loss resembles our own emergence from adolescence into the hard realities of adulthood. It’s so brutally familiar we cannot look away. And yet redemption lingers as it did for all of us. In the warmth of spring. Long After December.