The New People

by Andrea Uptmor

Genres: Family Life

Synopsis

A searing and strikingly intimate debut set in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, about a newly married lesbian couple who move into a flipped foreclosure, unaware that the former homeowners are still living in the attic.

Months after the housing bubble bursts, newlywed Chicagoans Emma and Rachel move into a charming little house in a conservative Indiana college town, hoping for a fresh start after a painful miscarriage. As Rachel immerses herself in her new role as a tenure-track professor and bestselling novelist, adjunct Emma struggles in the shadow of her wife’s success. Desperate to build something of her own, Emma secretly pursues IVF, even as Rachel insists they wait to have children. The house, initially a symbol of new beginnings, becomes a refuge for Emma from the town she’s convinced is set against her—until strange occurrences make her question whether she and her wife are truly alone.

They aren’t.

Charlotte and Dirk, the former homeowners, are secretly living in the attic above Emma and Rachel’s attached garage. Dispossessed by the recession and anxious about her husband’s declining health, Charlotte listens to the interlopers below, and her resentment steadily grows. What starts as small acts of defiance—missing food, flipped breakers in the fuse box, subtle scratches in the furniture—soon becomes sabotage. But when her campaign to drive out the couple goes too far, Charlotte’s and Emma’s stories converge in an explosive climax that will reveal the lengths people will go to reclaim what they’ve lost.

Release date: July 21, 2026

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 368

Sample

Emma had felt the house was haunted from the moment Rachel opened the door with their new key. Maybe not literally. But the metaphorical ghosts were undeniable. For one thing, there was the smell. The pinch of new carpet and fresh paint only masked an older, more penetrative odor of mildew, which the central air-conditioning, already on, dispersed like a sour rain. In the entryway she noticed the faint outline of what must have been a child’s height marks etched into the doorframe, now painted over. There was something about flipped houses that reminded Emma of a surgeon’s scrubs: No matter how clean they were, you knew that at one point, someone else’s life had stained them.

Rachel slipped her arm around Emma’s waist as they appraised themselves in the hallway mirror, which gleamed like a still lake. It occurred to Emma that someone—who?—must have taken time with a bottle of blue cleaner so that this, the moment she and her wife entered their new home, would remain as clear and sharp in their memories as the day they were married, just six weeks before.

Yet she saw with dismay that she looked the same as she always had, with a sharply sloping forehead and thin eyebrows that, together, gave her an expression of disapproval, even when she was trying hard to be nice. Ample hips but scant eyelashes she had to coax into existence with mascara every morning. Next to her, Rachel’s body was long and simple, with hard calves from running and triceps that knotted under her slender arms. She’d been a swimmer in high school, and, despite not having been in a pool for years, she retained a swimmer’s body, graceful and easy.

“I’m looking very George Eliot today,” said Emma. “Don’t laugh,” she said, though it always pleased her when Rachel laughed. “I’ve got that Victorian homeliness in my DNA.”

“It’s not you, it’s the mirror. They make everything cheap now.” Rachel bent her knees and bobbed up and down. “See. It’s warped.”

“Yet somehow you still look perfect.”

Her wife gave a coy shrug. Birdie, their Pomeranian, emerged from behind their ankles, the fur on her cheek still flattened from a long nap in the car. She sniffed the air and barked, skittering off down the hall to explore.

“She smells it,” said Emma. “The mythical backyard. I hope it doesn’t go to her head.”

“Oh, it will.” Rachel nodded. “No more pathetic apartment courtyard for her. She’ll be drunk on power from now on.”

They broke apart to explore the new world before them: A dining room where pendant lights hung over gleaming hardwood floors, a bathroom with brushed-nickel fixtures. A short hallway with a large closet joined the two bedrooms. Emma walked through rooms, touching everything. The house, a two-bedroom, fourteen-hundred-square-foot, one-story Cape Cod with a sharply pointing roof, a small finished basement, a backyard hot tub, and—the part Emma and Rachel could not get over—an attached garage, looked so different than it had when they’d first seen the place two months ago. In June the wisteria covering the side of the house had been in full bloom, its flowers hanging like pendulums and smelling sweet. That was before the renovation, when the former owners’ furniture was still there, cowering along the walls like naughty children who’d been told to wait for their parents to arrive. Now the baseboards gleamed with fresh white paint and Emma could hear, faintly, the sweet slide whistle of a cardinal on a branch outside.

Emma hung her purse on a decorative wall hook by the door. The hook fell out almost immediately, leaving a hole that flatulated a cloud of plaster dust. The contents of her bag—cell phone, a tin of herbal tea bags, loose M&M’s, and the rattling prescription from Dr. Casey—spewed onto the floor.

“Whoops.” She pushed the hook back into its hole, but it hung loosely, incapably, like a bird’s broken wing. Annoyed, she left it dangling, turned toward the garage, and opened the door.

Expecting an empty space, she nearly jumped to see that one side of the garage was crowded with furniture from the previous owners. Next to the built-in shelves on the far wall, a futon squatted beside side tables and credenzas—all the dusty pieces the real estate agent had promised would be gone after the closing. The furniture gave off the same musty smell, as if it’d been retrieved from a lake and left here to dry out. There was no room to park their car unless they got rid of all this stuff, which, Emma knew, would not happen unless she took care of it.

She stepped down into the garage and pressed the plastic button on the wall to open the overhead door. Nothing. Her eyes followed the track along the ceiling to the motorized unit. It looked ancient, with an open plastic panel and loose wires as if someone had started to fix it and then simply walked away.

“Useless,” she said. “What a surprise.” Still, she stood in the doorway and savored, for the moment, another thing gone wrong. There was some satisfaction in collecting all the ways she’d been right, however small and worthless they were, like a child gathering dandelions in a basket. She hadn’t wanted to move here. She’d felt heavy with bleak inevitability the first time they’d seen pictures of the house online. The real estate agent had photoshopped different furniture into the rooms to suggest their potential for livability, though the hasty crops and poor lighting conveyed more desperation than homeyness. But the price was shocking—half the cost of a two-bedroom condo on the north side of Chicago—and anyway, Emma knew as she watched Rachel click through the pictures that her wife had already made up her mind.

Emma stepped inside the garage and went to the exterior door, which had a window that looked out on the backyard. She watched Birdie sniff around the hot tub, which looked hulkish and lonely on its concrete slab. Its vinyl cover was peeling and sun-bleached, but those were things she could fix. She imagined being in the hot tub with Rachel, leaning their heads against the plastic headrests, letting their bodies float to the surface as moonlight dappled their skin.

Maybe it wasn’t all going to be bad.

Stepping back in the house, Emma reached up her hand to turn out the light. A jolt of static electricity made her yank her arm back. She put her finger in her mouth, where it tingled briefly against her tongue. Wiping her finger on her jeans, she left the garage behind and closed the door.

“Rach?” she called. “Where’d you go?”

No answer. Birdie bounded into the hall, exhilarated and warmed by the sun. She touched her nose to Emma’s calf and then veered into the kitchen, where Emma heard Rachel exclaim, “Ah, hier gibt mein liebehund!” Rachel was learning German, nearly fluent after only a few weeks of YouTube videos. Her cell phone chime was a mnemonic of German prepositions set to the tune of “The Blue Danube” waltz: aus, ausser, bei, mit, nach, seit, von, zu. It had been ringing so frequently with details of her university onboarding and well wishes from new colleagues that Emma found herself humming the tune unconsciously, grinding her teeth to its triple meter in her sleep.

Emma followed the dog to the kitchen, where Rachel was blanketing the granite counter with their overnight provisions, meant to last at least until the moving pod arrived the next day: naan, hummus, two pears, a brick of white cheddar, a bottle of wine, toothbrushes, a tangle of chargers, Birdie’s food and water dishes, and two hardcovers—a novel for Emma and essays on the intersections of bodily rhetoric and feminism for Rachel. The cover of Rachel’s book was a photograph of a woman’s hand posing as a small body: two red-lacquered fingernails pressed on the floor like feet with the thumb like a hand on its hip. The image bothered Emma for reasons she couldn’t quite place. Nor did she understand why Rachel kept dust jackets on books at all. Emma removed it as soon as she purchased a book, shedding its glossy skin off into the trash like scraping a dinner plate. Rachel went so far as to tape the jacket to the book, which ensured the entire product remained intact as the publisher intended it. Rachel was a rule follower. She was reliable like that.

Emma wrapped her arms around her wife from behind and lightly bit the place between Rachel’s scapulae, firm from yoga. She felt her wife’s breath deepen, and Emma slipped her hands inside the front of her shirt. She parted Rachel’s curls with her nose and let her tongue graze the warm skin at the base of her wife’s neck.

Rachel flattened her palms on the countertop. “Are you sure?”

Emma was.

They went to the guest bedroom, the only room with carpeting. Emma tugged Rachel’s shirt up, pressed their soft bellies together. The curtainless window cast a yellow square in the middle of the floor, and they found themselves on it, drawn to its warm respite from the blasting air-conditioning. The carpet was not as soft as it looked; it left a raw patch on Emma’s shoulder blades where she arched her back against it. Emma let her mind go, her body pressing on with its own agenda. She knew Rachel was looking at her—Rachel always liked to look at her—but Emma closed her eyes and let her mind run through a pastiche of fuck miscellany: skin, tongues, the involuntary flex of muscles under glistening skin.

“Oh, Emma.”

Rachel unwove herself from Emma and looked down at her hand. Blood. They both stared. Rachel wiped her fingers on her T-shirt to protect the carpet.

“I’m sorry. I thought it was over,” said Emma.

“Jesus, don’t apologize,” said Rachel. “Are you okay? Does it hurt?”

“I’m fine.”

Rachel didn’t move. Not until Emma said, “Please.” Only when she was gone, when Emma could hear the faucet running in the hallway bathroom, did Emma hold her shirt up to her mouth and let out a sound that only Birdie, who appeared in the doorway with her ears cocked, could hear.

The moving pod did not, in fact, arrive the next day. Rachel was put on hold for forty minutes before someone told her that the pod had mistakenly been sent to the wrong state. Apparently there was also a Riverbend, Oregon.

“It happens all the time, actually,” the company representative said without a trace of apology or irony. “What do you think we have you sign a waiver for?”

When Rachel hung up, she said, “It’s a real Dalloway, honey.” This was a joke that had evolved over the years, ever since one of their first dates, when Emma had arrived at the bar late and breathless, unwinding the scarf around her neck as she explained that her apartment’s dishwasher had spread bubbles across the floor because her roommate had used Dawn dish soap instead of dishwasher detergent. “My day has gone worse than Mrs. Dalloway’s,” she’d said in apology, and Rachel had burst into such genuine laughter, her teeth shining in the bar’s red neon light, that the joke had stuck, the name becoming shorthand for life’s inconveniences.

Without the moving pod, the house continued to feel vacant and ownerless. In addition to the backpack with their first night’s provisions, Emma and Rachel had brought a couple of suitcases full of clothing and a few small boxes of meaningful items with them, enough to make do for a few days. But Emma thought longingly of all that was missing: Their couch with its back cushions flattened from years of Birdie’s thick, koala-like naps. The oak bookshelves and their eclectic volumes, whose worn spines Emma would run her fingers along as she talked on the phone. The blue mason jars they drank water and iced tea and wine from. The kilim rug she had ordered from Turkey for a bewilderingly low price; when it arrived and was only two square feet, Rachel had hung it on the wall and proclaimed it art.

Back in Chicago, they’d hired two college boys in sweat-resistant tracksuits to load their moving pod, which had been delivered on a truck. The boys drank bottles of purple electrolyte juice and obeyed Emma as she pointed them around the apartment. They pushed trolley after trolley of book boxes down the elevator and across the courtyard, sweat rolling off the ends of their noses. It was hot outside, the August air wavy and thick. Each piece of her life they carried out felt like it was connected to her body, and it tugged at her stomach and heart and throat to see them swallowed into the mouth of the moving pod. When Rachel went out to pick up sandwiches for lunch, Emma finally broke down.

One of the boys had touched her shoulder and she’d jumped—she hadn’t heard him come in—and when she handed him his tip, he’d said, “Indiana, right? Shit, I’d cry too.”

On their second full day in Riverbend, Emma and Rachel went to the closest grocery store, a big-box retailer, and filled the cart with oatmeal and hot sauce and tampons and eggs and shampoo. Since their bed was on the pod, they picked out new sheets and an inflatable mattress. When Emma stooped to get it from the bottom shelf, Rachel swatted her hands.

“Go easy,” Rachel said, heaving the plastic package into the cart. “Remember what Dr. Casey said. No heavy lifting.”

“I feel fine. And it’s not exactly heavy.”

“Just for another few days, okay? Then you can go back to pretending that you enjoy strenuous physical activity.”

Emma affectionately pinched her wife’s arm. “Get out of here, lady. Go home and alphabetize your Woolfs and Wolfes.”

Rachel groaned. “My Woolf pack! Where do you think it is now?”

“The worst fate, I’m afraid. Bouncing on a highway somewhere in Idaho.”

The grocery aisles abruptly ended and dumped them into the book section before a side-cap display of new fiction. “Hey, they have the new June Gaskill,” said Emma, picking up a heavy book. “I love her. The Times called this book ‘an exercise in intellectual exhaustion.’ Remember? And I was like, ‘This review is an exercise in’—”

“You have to be kidding me.”

Emma looked up to see her wife’s face purpling with embarrassment. An entire pyramid display of Rachel’s novel with its bright yellow cover towered above her. A hand-lettered sign, colored painstakingly with marker by an employee, read BOOK OF THE WEEK! Beside it was Rachel’s author photo with her vaguely confused smile, Lake Michigan in soft focus beyond.

“Oh, wow.” Emma read the card. “‘Give Me Five Moons is a stunning debut that mixes science fiction with literary prowess. Its examination of human relationships against the backdrop of a sinister reproductive technology offers a thought-provoking exploration of both the possibilities and limitations of motherhood in an evolving world.’” She clucked her tongue. “I mean, they copied that straight from The Guardian, but still. Very nice for a superstore review.”

“Let’s go,” Rachel said, putting her hand on the cart. She hardly ever mentioned the novel now that the press had died down; she worried it might sabotage the respect she’d worked so hard to earn as an academic. Rachel and Emma also both knew but never discussed how deeply the book’s success had wounded Emma, the actual fiction writer, who had never been able to find an agent for her own novel. Every literary agency had sent Emma some version of the same personalized pass: This is the hardest kind of rejection to send.… A book this quiet just won’t sell in today’s market.… There’s not as much appreciation these days for the art of the sentence, as much as we might personally feel otherwise. Emma’s publishing career was a collection of almosts: runner-up for a number of fiction prizes, a finalist for two fellowships that each ultimately went to someone else. The worst had been two years ago when she’d secured a tentative offer from a small but respected independent publisher that folded before the deal could be finalized.

Yet it had been Emma who suggested Rachel try her hand at fiction—“Something genre, maybe,” she’d said—to keep Rachel’s mind busy while awaiting news of whether her dissertation would be accepted for publication. Rachel had initially considered the novel a distraction but before long had fully thrown herself into the exercise. When Emma read the first draft, she was proud, but there was something else too. A sense of yearning, perhaps, for how it might have felt to put something on the page without the weight of self-doubt slowing the process down. Rachel’s novel was precise and descriptive and just the right length. It was a new idea with sharply written characters. It had all the ingredients of a great book, but there was something essential missing, something Emma couldn’t put her finger on. Perhaps it was the same thing that was missing in Rachel herself: messiness.

Emma was attracted to messy books. She liked quiet, interminable scenes and sprawling descriptions of domestic realism. She liked endings that felt like the quiet sigh that escapes after a headache dissolves. Rachel’s book wasn’t her type, per se, but she knew it would have broad appeal. So when Rachel’s dissertation was rejected by her top-choice academic publisher, Emma sent the novel to a literary agency. She’d hoped for some positive feedback to boost Rachel’s confidence, but she hadn’t expected the scale of the response. The agent had not just emailed back; she’d called Rachel three days after receiving the query and signed her immediately. The book quickly sold at auction for a staggering amount of money, and shortly after that, Emma filed away her own manuscript for good.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise. Rachel did nearly everything better than Emma did. For Emma, writing was not so much like pecking away at something but like picking at a knot that refused to come undone. But she loved her wife, and whether Emma liked it or not, her wife was now a bestselling author.

Emma took a book and placed it along with the Gaskill atop the precarious pile of home goods in the cart.

“What are you doing?” Rachel asked. “We have, like, twenty-five copies in the moving pod.”

“But the pod isn’t here. What if a neighbor pops by and I want to show you off, Professor?”

“Don’t be obnoxious.”

“Don’t pretend it’s nothing,” Emma said, sliding her hands onto the cart handle and steering it toward the checkout line, “when the rest of us can see that it’s something.”

They decided to take the long route home to get a better feel for the city and found themselves winding through an industrial park that looked as if it had been abandoned long ago. Empty parking lots reflected the expansive, cloudless sky. FOR SALE: PRIME RETAIL SPACE blared a red sign; Emma caught the phrase vibrant shopping corridor and wondered if that signaled an optimism for the future or a clinging to a past that no longer existed. One apartment complex, its paint flaking, bore a patchwork of signs and legal notices. Emma could read only one, handwritten on cardboard, as they drove by: PLEASE CHECK FOR KITTENS BEFORE DEMOLITION.

“Riverbend reminds me of where I grew up,” said Emma. “Except in Arcola, they wouldn’t have bothered with a sign. Too much spelling.”

“Right.” Rachel adjusted her sun visor. “So you’ve said.”

“Did I ever tell you I grew up half a mile from an abandoned grain elevator? I gave Kyle Richards a terrible hand job there, and a week later it collapsed.”

“Thanks for that image.”

“You’re welcome.” Emma patted Rachel’s thigh. “I peaked at fifteen, didn’t I? It’s all been downhill since the grain elevator.”

Rachel smiled. “Baby, I know your childhood was a mess of religious indoctrination and tractor races—”

“Tractor pulls.”

“But Riverbend versus Arcola is not a fair comparison. Also, it’s 2008. We’ve got a Black guy running for president. We’re two ladies who are married! This is an entirely new world compared to when we were kids.”

“I know.” Emma looked out the window. She hadn’t been to her hometown in over ten years, but its contours still shaped her thoughts. Sometimes when she closed her eyes at night she saw, without warning, a faded red-brick post office or a country road flanked by cornfields. Arcola was both a philosophical idea, something that hadn’t actually happened to her, and a grim sediment that had calcified in her memory, like a tattoo she’d forgotten she had.

“I’m actually glad we’re here,” Rachel said. They were stopped at a red light beside a McDonald’s letterboard sign that read HARD WORK, NOT HANDOUTS. $7/HOUR START.

“Because you want French fries?” Emma asked.

“I mean in Riverbend. This place needs a little queering up.”

“Ah, yes. The rainbow touch.”

“Funny.”

“Where small town meets big gay dreams.”

“Okay, never mind.” The light turned green. Rachel flipped her visor back up. “I was being serious.”

“Sorry,” said Emma. “You know you have a heart of gold, Rachel Sullivan.” Rachel didn’t answer, but her shoulders drew back in the way they did when she was pleased.

As they wove through the residential streets closer to their new home, Emma craned her neck to try and get a sense of the people who lived in this part of the city. The university was north of here, where graduate students and lower-ranking faculty kept the campus bus lines full and the Starbucks open until ten o’clock at night. But the area south of campus was harder to parse, a mix of sagging porches and newly flipped homes with glossy exteriors. The houses were set back from the road, which in Chicago would have suggested Lincoln Park wealth or comfortable suburbia. But here the lawns were bald in places, the driveways cracked and buckled. The curtains were drawn over every window, and Emma imagined their interiors were all a copy of the house she’d grown up in: Green plaid cushions on a wooden couch frame coated in wax, the humming yellow refrigerator weighted with half-empty ketchup bottles, brown carpeting flattened from years of her mother’s pacing. A plastic crucifix presiding over meat-loaf dinners from its spot on the kitchen wall.

On their new block alone Emma counted three McCain bumper stickers and six signs supporting the reelection of the Republican governor, a white man with a tall forehead and thin lips. He looked like he could be either of their fathers. Well, maybe not Rachel’s father. Rachel’s father had a low ponytail and was the chair of the philosophy department at the University of Chicago. Rachel’s father said things like “Are we not floating in space, then?” whenever he wanted someone to reevaluate their opinions. Emma loved him; he read all of her stories, sending her handwritten notes (I nearly had a coronary on the treadmill when I got to the scene with the doctor!) after each publication, even the ones behind a paywall. Her own father had never read her writing. That was probably for the best.

Emma said, “We can’t forget to register to vote.”

“You haven’t yet? I did it online last week.”

Emma looked at her wife. With her hair pulled back she looked angelic, eyebrows high and innocent. “Oh, lady. Of course you did.”

By the weekend, the pod still hadn’t arrived and the moving company offered no further updates on its ETA. With nothing to unpack, Emma turned to administrative tasks. She hung a big calendar on the door of the kitchen pantry. With a marker, she neatly wrote in her and Rachel’s class schedules, marking times when they’d share the car and times when one of them would need to take the bus. Emma didn’t have to teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and she was filled with anticipation for the long hours she would spend on those days reading and cooking and easing herself gently back into writing. She hadn’t had that kind of freedom in years. Rachel had dangled this promise like a carrot when coaxing Emma to Indiana.

When the calendar was done, Emma opened her laptop and reviewed her class roster. It had been nearly two years since she’d sworn she’d never adjunct again, and here she was, facing down two sections of Intro to Rhetoric, each with twenty-six nearly identical white faces.

“A Kenneth, three Brittanys, and two Michaels walk into a classroom,” she called out to Rachel, who didn’t answer, which was fine because Emma hadn’t worked out a punch line.

As was required of all faculty, she had copied the dense brick of university policies—disability accommodations, plagiarism, attendance—and pasted it on the last two pages of her syllabus. When she’d taught in Chicago, it had been a joke among her colleagues that students never read the fine print; those pages were a waste of the precious hundred and fifty photocopies loaded onto their faculty cards each semester. One semester her friend Anna had suggested a contest to find the rare student who read the policies—“The one true undergraduate!”—and the writing instructors began dropping hidden messages into the final pages of their syllabi, things like Email Sun Yi if you have read this and she will give you five extra-credit points and Announce your favorite television show exactly four minutes into class and get an automatic pass on that day’s quiz. Students rarely noticed these messages, but when they did, that teacher would be owed a beer by their colleagues at happy hour. Those friendships had buoyed Emma during the misery of adjuncting, through the low pay and crippling self-doubt she was positive her students could sense in her. It was bizarre to be stepping back into this world, and without any friends this time.

In a moment of nostalgia, Emma opened her syllabus and typed, Congratulations on finding this hidden message! You’ve proven yourself to be more observant than a vice president on a quail hunt. Email Emma the name of your favorite band and receive a pass on one weekly quiz.

When course prep was done,. . .