IF YOU LEAVE

A novel

Regal House Publishing

Fall 2025

When an art collector takes an interest in one of her older paintings, Audrey Bray may earn the means to finally end her embittered marriage to Ben. But her determination to leave him flags when an old friend, Lucille, returns to Washington. Her arrival dredges up painful memories from their time together during World War II, when Audrey opened her home to Lucille—a simple act of shelter with lasting consequences. Chafing under her husband’s false promises, Lucille’s nearly unforgivable estrangement, and the responsibility to care for a daughter, Lake, who’s cutting her own artistic—and potentially dangerous—path in the turbulent 1960s and ‘70s, Audrey must resolve at last the tensions between creativity and motherhood, duty and self. Read more about If You Leave.

BIO

Margaret Hutton is the author of the forthcoming novel, If You Leave (Regal House Publishing, October 2025). She is a native of North Carolina, where she graduated with honors in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After working as an environmental reporter, she earned an MFA from George Mason University, receiving the Heritage Writer Award for distinguished fiction. Her fiction has appeared in The South Carolina Review, The Sun, The Chattahoochee Review, Artful Dodge, the anthology Abundant Grace, and The Antioch Review. She lives in the Washington, DC-area, with her husband and daughter.

Publications

What mother doesn’t ache when the distance between her and her daughter stretches like taffy and then breaks off?

“Bride”

The Antioch Review

Even when he was a small boy, his mother said, “You worry too much. You let go of one worry and pick up another. You reach for a worry the way other kids reach for candy.”

“The Heiress and the Radioman”

Abundant Grace

There was nothing more likely to cause despair than a room darkening at midday.

“Cold Voice”

Artful Dodge

He found that the uncomplicated horizon line he’d relied on was now the problem with the beach: while the eyes rest, the imagination stays active. The past, or the problem at hand, is on you and can’t be dismissed so easily.

“Think of the Children”

The Chattahoochee Review

My mother and father came together like hands meeting in prayer, but with Aunt Sissy’s strand of pearls, a garter on my thigh—something borrowed and something blue—what could the Lord grant that this bride didn’t have?

“Girl in a White Dress”

Finalist in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award Contest

I never saw him up close. I never heard his telephone ring. I never heard his voice (although I imagined he mumbled to himself when he couldn’t find his umbrella, when he had no money for Chinese food, when he couldn’t sleep at night). While I tapped on my keyboard, untangling definitions of chiaroscuro and pentimento for untrained liberal-arts students, I listened for him. If I couldn’t hear him, I sat quietly until a noise told me where he was. Then I went back to work, satisfied that I was the person closest to him in the world.

“For the Man Upstairs”

The Sun

Mama cried, but you couldn’t hear her, not with me screaming like a train was coming and we were all tied to the tracks.

“Vander"

The South Carolina Review

Read Margaret’s musings here.

View Margaret’s artwork here.

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