Excerpt from Meet Me at the Crossroads by Megan Giddings, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He walked and walked through an orange desert until he heard someone singing. He turned and there she was. The man walked her across the desert. Her hand was cold. I will stay with you forever, he said. This is the space where later, at their church, they invited people to testify. To listen to what God had given us: a chance to resurrect our dead. Yes, there were dangers to going through the doors, but this was all meant to be a test of his love.

And some people said his wife had never been truly missing. She had taken advantage of the chaos to run off with her lover but then things with the lover had been boring. The wife refused to talk about the other side. She would not answer questions about what it had been like to drown. She could not talk about what her body was. A blasphemy, some churches said. So, soon, most people ignored them. This is one of the things about living now, if a thing only stays mysterious, doesn't give a person money or acclaim, only seems to exist as a reminder of the universe's vast inscrutability, it is often deemed as being worthless or a grift. A minor tragedy of modern times might be how much comfort has become valued over knowledge or kindness or understanding.

But some families remained to worship. New people, who longed for their beloveds, trickled into these different churches. In Michigan, a new religion formed: the Church of Fortitude and Blessings was one of its many names. Ayanna's father was one of the first children raised in it. His parents, because they were more lenient than others and because theirs was a spirited kid who was good at math, still let him go to public school. He learned quickly not to tell other people about his faith. Services were on Tuesday nights and Sunday mornings. When he went and prayed before the door, he started wearing hats and hoods, hoping not to be easily recognized from a distance. Enough Black families had moved into the area that it was possible. And besides, Antony was pretty popular at school.

Don't worry, this is a story about Ayanna. Be patient. Soon, she'll be born.

Antony was popular at church too, because his mother was considered a seer. In those beginning days, it was more of a catchall term than just about prophecy. Think of it as akin to nun. She prayed, she kept everyone fed, and she knit sweaters and blankets while watching television and made them available to others in a small basket at every service. She encouraged a community to blossom. For a week before it actually happened, she had a recurring dream in which the door in Michigan finally swung open.

Each dream was the same: Walking in their old shopping market, picking up the Cheerios Antony loved, then heading to the milk aisle. There, next to a display for eggnog and eggnog-flavored nondairy creamer, was the blue door. A sound like a car crash from a distance where people ask what was that and then speculate about what it was. Peeking out behind floral curtains, they saw the people arguing in the street, the smashed glass, the red and blue lights approaching. The door swung open, and her own voice said, Don't let Antony come in here. Sometimes, it said, Don't let your kin walk these paths.

She didn't tell people that the door spoke to her in these dreams.

On the Saturday morning when it happened, she grabbed Antony by the hood of his sweatshirt and kept a firm grip on the black fabric. There was what looked like a path made of gold in the doorway, a boulder covered in rich green moss, in normal-looking grass. Another child, desperate to be the first person in the world to pass through the door, sprinted toward it and then was pushed out of the way by an adult man. A few people gasped. The child's mother yelled "asshole" at the man, and someone else turned and started scolding her for using that language in front of the children. A teenage boy chased the man—no one could tell if he was racing him to the entrance or teaching him a lesson for pushing a child. Antony longed to be a member of the scene, rather than an observer. He could sense all the gossip and bragging rights and attention to be harvested from doing something wild in this moment but would never squirm or push away from his mother. That was a story he did not want to have told about him.

Excerpted from Meet Me at the Crossroads by Megan Giddings. Copyright © 2025 by Megan Giddings. Excerpted by permission of Amistad. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.