The Tunnel and the Cake — Brian Kiley

I'm trying not to let the tunnel ruin my life. It's already ruined both my marriages, and it's ruined much of the last forty years. I'm trying not to let it ruin the rest. You do a stupid thing when you're thirteen and it shouldn't haunt you forever. And yet it does. It's the late 1970s. Young Luke Duncan's crush on his neighbor, a girl two years ahead of him in school, triggers an elaborate plan to be her protector and win her love. Over the course of an academic year, the plan grows from a daydream to single-minded attempts to execute his mission. Brian Kiley's novel, a complex and moving story told by adult Luke, revisits how young Luke's actions caused fissures throughout his small-town world, fissures that resulted in an implosion that reverberated through his family, his friends, and his future.