The Wall Between Us

Belonging, Betrayal and the Barriers We Build

By: R. Morningstar

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

She spent twelve years building belonging. It took two months to watch it burn.

Maya Petrovic Mitchell is exactly where she's supposed to be. As director of the Riverside Community Center in her Ohio hometown, she's created after-school programs that change lives, built partnerships that strengthen neighborhoods, and earned the trust of a community that has known her since childhood. Her parents fled war as refugees thirty-five years ago, but Maya was born here. This is her home—until a documentary about ethnic cleansing in her parents' homeland goes viral, and suddenly, belonging becomes conditional.

Families withdraw their children from her programs without explanation. Her best friend stops returning calls. Board members who celebrated her work now suggest she take a "voluntary" leave of absence for "optics." The community center that was her life's work empties out as people who have known her for years can no longer see past her family name, her parents' origin, the veil of "otherness" that has descended between her and everyone she thought she knew.

Maya's daughter sits alone at lunch. Her son gets asked if their family are war criminals. Her husband stays late at work to avoid questions. And Maya faces an impossible choice: accept her removal quietly, or force her community to confront what they're doing by speaking a truth they don't want to hear.

Inspired by Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil," this searing novel explores how quickly Americans can decide that their neighbors don't belong, how fear transforms friends into strangers, and what happens when the person behind the veil refuses to disappear quietly. It's about the conditional nature of acceptance in communities that pride themselves on tolerance, the invisible barriers that descend when people become afraid, and the exhausting work of proving your humanity to people who have already decided you're other.

Maya didn't change—but the way people see her did. And once the veil descends, once someone is marked as foreign no matter how American they are, there may be no way to lift it. Because the veil was never on her face. It was always over their eyes.

The Wall Between Us: A novel about belonging, betrayal, and the barriers we build when fear becomes stronger than friendship.