They're not gone. You're the one who disappeared.

One ordinary day, nearly half of humanity vanishes.

A teenager comes downstairs to find her family gone, their cars still in the garage. A boy finds the permission slip his mother finally signed, but no mother. A man returns to work and finds cold coffee, abandoned desks, and coworkers who were there only hours before.

Across the world, families, workplaces, and governments are split straight down the middle.

There are no bodies. No warning. And no explanation that makes sense.

Then the pattern begins to emerge.

The disappearances weren't random.

But the vanished aren't dead.

They're living in another version of the same world, grieving the very people who are grieving them, each side utterly certain the other is gone.

As the months pass, both worlds begin to rebuild. Families reshape themselves around impossible absences. Governments adapt. Children grow up. People fall in love, fall apart, and learn to live with questions no one can answer.

But some questions won't stay buried. On both sides, ordinary people keep circling the same impossible idea: whatever happened to them was not an accident, and somebody, somewhere, already knows why.

The Split is a character-driven speculative novel about two worlds divided by something no one understands, and the ordinary people trying to build lives inside the mystery.