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.