"But We Love Each Other" Part: 5 of 11

"1970's Detroit Urban Fiction!"

But We love Each other Part 5

A coming‑of‑age Southern story with Motown dreams, family fights, and the pull of a new life.

Shaylean is done with the slow churn of Washington, Arkansas — the gossip, the cotton fields, the small‑town expectations. She hears Detroit in her sister’s laughter over the phone: assembly lines, neon nights, Motown on every corner. It sounds like freedom. It sounds like everything she doesn’t have.
Torn between a stubborn mother who runs the house with a cane and a brother trying to keep the peace, Shaylean packs her longing into secret shoeboxes and daydreams of platform shoes on Woodward Avenue. There are boys to love and boys who promise safety — Doodle, the hometown basketball star, and Bobby, the distant soldier in Vietnam whose letters taste of danger and possibility. Every step toward the post office, every whispered plan, pushes her closer to the life she’s decided she deserves.
But escape never comes clean. Family loyalty, shame, and the heavy judgment of a town that refuses to forget and complicating every choice. As Shaylean tests the edges of independence, she learns that leaving is only the first step — surviving what you leave behind may be the hardest part of all.
Raw, soulful, and alive with period detail, this chapter of But We Love Each Other explores the cost of dreams and the price of walking away. If you love gritty coming‑of‑age tales set against the soundtrack of Motown, Shaylean’s story will stay with you long after the last page. Author. Mr. True Story.