He tried not to pick a side.The country picked one for him.
The line a child drew through the middle of his country.
Austin, 2028. Santiago DelTorro is handed the constitutional case of the century, and the country begins to fracture along a line that was always there.
Fifty ways into one country.
Wyatt kept his on the kitchen table and colored it in as the states decided. This one is shaded by how coldly the people in each state rate the other party. Tap any state.
He built a career arguing both sides.
Now the country wants an answer.
The line a child drew through the middle of his country.
Austin, 2028. The constitutional case of the century, and a lawyer who has never taken a side.
Austin, 2028. Civil litigator Santiago DelTorro has spent his career arguing both sides of an argument without appearing to favor either. It has made him effective. It has made him careful. It has made him, in ways he doesn't yet understand, unprepared for the moment that asks him to choose.
When a data scientist surfaces evidence of an eight-year federal conspiracy targeting six states, and a Texas Attorney General two years ahead of everyone else hands Santiago the constitutional case of the century, the country begins to fracture along a line that was always there. Six governors sign. Six states leave. And Santiago becomes the public face of the argument at the exact moment the country can no longer look away.
He will lose his fiancée. He won't see it coming.
A nine-year-old boy named Wyatt has been updating his map. Green for yes. Blue for no. Gray for the ones that haven't decided. He told his mother: the gray states can still decide.
He hasn't learned to stop believing the obvious thing yet. Divided Houses is the first novel in The Union Trilogy.
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Two years after six states walked out, the country has settled into its new shape. Two capitals. Two sets of laws. A border where a highway used to be. The fighting has not started. That is the part nobody planned for.
Once a month a boy crosses that border to see his father. In March 2029 the father invokes paragraph 4(c) of a custody decree signed two years earlier and keeps him seven days longer. He is allowed to. He may do it three times a year.
Nobody breaks a law. The clause is valid. It was correctly drafted, correctly invoked, and correctly enforced, and there is no one to charge.
Santiago DelTorro built a career arguing that Americans could still talk to each other. Silent Tables asks him what he does when the forms of law are the thing taking a child, and the only way to get the boy home is to write something that works.
Book One was the fracture. Book Two is the cost. Open Doors is the repair, and it is the hardest of the three, because a country that stopped talking has to start again in a room, on the record, with its name signed at the bottom.
Not written yet. The Docket knows first.
Keep the door open.
Three books, one argument.
The trilogy is not about a war. It is about the cost of people refusing to talk to each other, priced out over three books in the currency of ordinary life. A career, a marriage, a custody schedule, a child's map on a kitchen table. The line runs through all three. In the first book it divides. In the second it strikes through. In the third it comes out of an open door.
Prologue
The cold open of Divided Houses, in full. Two scenes, three months apart, and neither man in them has met the other.
The file on Thomas Wyrick’s desk was forty-one pages, and he read all of them twice, because the men who paid for his time paid for him to be thorough.
DELTORRO, SANTIAGO A. Born Coral Gables, Florida, 1990. LSU, then the law school. A practice on Second Street in Austin that’s ten years old, profitable, small on purpose. One Supreme Court argument, 2025, a Houston corporate tax matter, argued for a client referred to him by someone he didn’t know. This someone was the reason the file existed. Page nine highlighted the covert nature of the arrangement with a single underlined sentence, and Wyrick read the sentence twice too.
The rest was background. A fiancée, DeFlour, Elizabeth Anne, of the Baton Rouge DeFlour Family. A condominium owned by her father. He was currently on retainer with the Henderson Group, twenty percent of the practice’s annual billing and climbing. A seven handicap at the Country Club of Louisiana where his best friend Brewster Miller, a state prosecutor with larger political ambitions, was chronically late to tee times. Two televised talking head debates, 2024 and 2026, opposite a constitutional lawyer from Austin named Jack Adams, who was now the attorney general of Texas, and who was the other reason the file existed.
Wyrick had assessed men for nineteen years, first for the government and then for the people who hired the government. The work was the same. You read what a man owed and what he wanted and what he had never been asked to give up, and you wrote down which of the three would bend him to your will.
He turned to the last page. The assessment box was his to fill and he filled it the way he filled all of them, in block letters a machine could read.
RETENTION OF CURRENT POSITIONING RECOMMENDED. NO CONTACT. NO ACTION.
Below it, the smaller box, the one that mattered.
REVIEW TRIGGER. ANY CONTACT BETWEEN SUBJECT AND ADAMS.
He closed the file. There were nine others on the desk that week, men and women of interest, each of them filed and weighed and dispositioned. He squared the corners of the stack and moved DelTorro to the bottom, because nothing in forty-one pages suggested the man would ever make the call that changed his classification.
Outside the window the traffic on the beltway went by, eight lanes of people driving home to houses they believed were theirs.
The man on the ridge had been in position since dark. He had lain in cold like this in other countries, for much less money.
Below him, three hundred yards out and holding, the federal observation post sat under floodlights. A trailer. A generator. A pole lamp throwing a clean white circle on the frozen grass, and inside the circle, now and then, a man in a marshal’s jacket who checked the perimeter at the top of each hour and stood a while at the rail looking south, toward Texas.
The man on the ridge did not look at him. He looked at his dial.
Wind out of the northwest at four, gusting six. Two hundred and eighty to the fence, three hundred and ten to the trailer door. Drop and drift he had worked out in the afternoon, from a pullout on the county road, with a spotting scope and a thermos and the radio playing a call-in show about the high price of diesel.
The one variable he could not plan was the hour. The timing was not his. That would come the same way the wage was delivered, through three separate phones with men whose names were not said. When the time came there would be one round shot and a long walk back down the dark side of the ridge, and by morning he would be four hundred miles of interstate away. He had done the walk in his head four times.
He adjusted the rifle a half inch and let it be while he blew slow heat from his lungs into his gloves, and waited for the phone in his chest pocket to vibrate.
The post’s light burned steady in the plain. The marshal came out at midnight exactly and stood at the railing, and his breath moved in the cold, and the man on the ridge watched him through glass and thought nothing about him at all.
What happens next
Chapter One is nine days later, on a veranda in Austin, and the country is already on fire. It comes by email with two more behind it.
They stopped talking first.
The leaving came after.
Austin, 2028. Six states go. Nobody fires a shot. A nine-year-old keeps the only honest map in the country.
Divided Houses is a novel about the year the argument ended and the country came apart in the quiet that followed. The prologue is on the site and the first three chapters are free by email. Put your address below and they are with you in a minute.
- · {{ magnetProof }}
- · One email a month. Book Two news first.
- · Leave whenever you want. Nothing is sold on, ever.
Check your email.
Chapters one, two and three are on their way. If they are not there in five minutes, look in promotions or spam, and drag them to your inbox so the next email arrives.
One click first. The email asks you to confirm the address, and the chapters arrive the moment you do.
While you wait, one question.
It is the question the whole trilogy is asking, and it is asked six times — six seats at the table, from the world down to you. About twenty seconds.
Pick a place and see what readers there said.
Tap any state on the map, or choose a country. The card also tells you how that state joined the country in the first place. Your own is already selected.
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Six seats at the table.
One question, asked six times, from the world down to you. Answer it and you see where everyone else landed. It takes about twenty seconds, and you do not have to be on the list to answer.
What readers somewhere else said.
Choose a country, or answer above and your own place is selected for you.
{{ placeName }}
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Fifty ways into one country.
Two records, on the same fifty states. How each one joined the country in the first place, and how wrong the people in it are about what the other side actually believes.
Switch layers below, then tap any state. Not one of them was admitted unanimously by accident, and not one of them guessed low.
Ratification votes from the US Senate Manual. Statehood dates from the National Archives.
T. P. Bartlett writes about the cost of silence.
The Union Trilogy started with a house, not a country. A family where people stopped speaking to each other over politics, and then could not remember how to start again, and then stopped noticing they had stopped. Nothing in that house was ever settled by argument. It was settled by absence. The country in these books breaks the same way and for the same reason.
Divided Houses is the first novel. Silent Tables and Open Doors follow.
Bartlett is a pen name and writes from North Georgia. These books argue that Americans have stopped seeing each other as anything but a side. A real name would tell you which side the author is on, and you would read the book through it. So there is no name to read it through. Judge the writing.
The name comes from an ancestor who landed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
They settled it, argued about it, and buried each other here.
Richard Bartlett was born at Ernley in Sussex in 1575 and the records give his trade as a shoemaker. He was sixty years old when he sailed. That is not an age at which a man leaves for opportunity.
England in 1635 had gone six years without a Parliament. Charles I was raising money without one, and William Laud, made Archbishop of Canterbury two years earlier, was running the church by inspection, silencing ministers who would not conform and prosecuting the ones who argued. Sussex was inside the reach of it. Whole congregations left in those years, by the shipload, and Newbury on the Parker River was founded the same year Richard got there.
The name reached this family through Sarah Bartlett Allen, born 1885, who carried it as a middle name into the DeLoach family and passed it no further.
Richard was also the great-great-grandfather of Josiah Bartlett, who signed the Declaration of Independence second and cast the first vote for the Articles of Confederation. Josiah descends from Richard through his son Richard. This line descends through his son John. Third cousin, nine times removed.
“The time is now at hand when we shall see whether America has virtue enough to be free or not.”
In a letter written just before independence.
“Of all the vices incident to man, lying is the most mean, most contemptible; it evinces a very weak, depraved heart, which shrinks at the exposure of motives and of actions.”
Also attributed to Bartlett.
A year after Newbury, Thomas Angell landed at Providence with Roger Williams and was named an original proprietor of the settlement. Massachusetts expelled Williams for holding that civil authority has no jurisdiction over conscience.
Michael Crepin Desloges was born in 1625 at Loges, in the Cher, in a France that was running out of room for Protestants. His son reached Isle of Wight County, Virginia, by 1680. The name became DeLoach on the way to Tennessee.
The paternal side are Armenians of New Julfa, in Isfahan, the quarter built by the people who walked there after Julfa was given three days to evacuate and then burned, in 1604. Gaspar Minasian, born 1784, was Governor of Vastikan Village. So was his son. Those are the only public offices anyone in this tree has ever held.
Six direct ancestors appear in DAR lineage books. One of them, George Adam Gardner, born 1740, is also in the Pennsylvania State Archives.
Four hundred years is a long time for a family to keep disagreeing and stay at the table.
Everything a desk needs.
Covers at print resolution, the bio at four lengths, the ISBNs by format, and one contact address. No blurbs yet. When there are real ones they go here and nowhere else.
T. P. Bartlett writes about the cost of silence.
T. P. Bartlett is a pen name, from an ancestor who settled at Newbury, Massachusetts, in 1635. The Union Trilogy is about a country that stops talking to itself. It was written by somebody with four empty chairs at the table and four hundred years of family on this land. Bartlett writes from North Georgia.
T. P. Bartlett is the author of the Union Trilogy, which begins with Divided Houses. The name is inherited, from Richard Bartlett, who settled at Newbury, Massachusetts, in 1635 and whose great-great-grandson Josiah signed the Declaration of Independence. Other lines reach Providence in 1636, Huguenot France, and the Armenian quarter of Isfahan. The trilogy is about a country that stops talking to itself. Bartlett writes from North Georgia.
T. P. Bartlett is a pen name. It belongs to Richard Bartlett, who sailed from Sussex and settled at Newbury, Massachusetts, in 1635, and who was the great-great-grandfather of Josiah Bartlett, second signer of the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Angell came to Providence with Roger Williams in 1636. Michael Crepin Desloges was born Protestant in central France in 1625, and his son reached Isle of Wight County, Virginia, by 1680. The paternal side are Armenians of New Julfa, in Isfahan.
Nearly four hundred years of this family on this land, and four chairs at the table nobody sits in.
The Union Trilogy is about a country that stops talking to itself. Bartlett writes from North Georgia.
A real name would tell you which side the author is on, and you would read the book through it. There is no name to read it through. Judge the writing.
Written interviews and email Q&A. Same week where possible.
Podcasts and radio, under the pen name.
Book clubs, by call or by written answers to your questions. There is a discussion guide.
Review copies for reviewers, booksellers and librarians.
The name on the books is the only one the author uses.
Say the thing plainly.
Interview requests, review copies, rights, or a note about the book. Reader mail is read, and answered when it can be.
It is in.
Press and rights get an answer inside a week. Reader mail takes longer and still gets read.
What this site keeps.
One email address, given on purpose, and one state if you choose to give it. Both live with the email provider that sends The Docket. Nothing is sold, rented, or handed to an advertiser.
The kitchen table answers are stored as whole numbers by place, with no email address, no IP address and nothing else that could point at a person. A state or country is only ever shown its own figures once twenty-five people there have answered. Below that it reads as not enough answers yet.
Commercial email has to carry a physical mailing address, and every email this list sends carries the publisher's. Signal & Story, LLC, 3482 Keith Bridge Road, Unit 182, Cumming, GA 30041. The author's home address appears nowhere, on no page and in no email.
There is no advertising pixel and no session recording. Page views are counted without cookies. Every email carries an unsubscribe link, and using it removes the record.
Where these numbers come from.
The question is: how well do people work out their differences of opinion? It is asked six times, about six seats at the table, in this order — the world, your country, your state, your town, your family, you. Each one is rated from 1, not at all, to 5, very well.
Everyone who answers is a reader of this book who chose to answer. That is not a sample of anything. It is self-selected, it skews toward people who just gave an author their email address, and it should be read that way.
The seats are asked from the world inward, and that order matters. Answering about the world first tends to lift the answers that come later. A version that asked from the inside out would produce different numbers. This one does not correct for that.
This is not a survey and it does not measure political division. It asks about differences of opinion, in general, and the phrasing is deliberately broad. What it shows is what readers of this book said.
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Answers are stored without an email address, an IP address, a user agent, or any other identifier. The store behind these numbers is separate from the mailing list and the two are never joined. A state with fewer than twenty-five answers is not shown on its own — the national figure stands in, because one determined person visibly moves a small state.
This page seceded.
The rest of the country is still standing.