No Way Down

Cal has opened eleven thousand gray metal traffic cabinets in fourteen years with the City of Fort Collins. He is the man everybody calls. His wife, Jess, works nights on a cardiac floor. His daughter, Maddie, wants to know why the sky is blue. His father lives at a memory care center across town and waits every afternoon on a bench for a bus that never comes. And the List on the kitchen fridge has thirty-one things on it, and Cal likes it that way.

Then, at noon on an ordinary October day, behind the coaling tower in an old rail yard, Cal finds something that isnt on any drawing: a staircase made of worn metal seats, rising out of the gravel and climbing into the open sky. No motor. No cable. No permit tag. Nothing holding it up.

He sits down. And he starts to climb.

No Way Down is a haunting, tender novel about a man who has spent his whole life holding on, the family that needs him to come back down, and what it costs to keep saying "one more minute." For readers who love quiet, strange, deeply human stories about fathers and sons, burnout, and the things we carry.