In 1995, Marsh Meriwether, a Montgomery man and a DVM at Auburn, is at a regional fraternity symposium when he meets Sumpter Hiott, an economics man from Alabama, and something shifts in a room that has no language for it. Thirty years later, Marsh is telling the story. What came between is the novel: the farm outside a small Alabama county seat, acquired one auction lot at a time until it became the life neither of them could name outright; the survivorship deed that stood in for the ceremony they could not have; the weather report that stood in for I love you; the forehead pressed to a forehead at a wedding that stood in for the kiss. The small, exact, allowed gesture carrying the full freight of the forbidden one. Common Ground is a novel about two men building a life in the only forms the era and the county will recognize, about the architecture of substitution, and about what it means to have loved someone for thirty years in a place that read both of you as brothers. Told in retrospective first person: Marsh, thirty years on, telling this story aloud to no one in particular and to everyone who needs to hear it.