“I’d swear that one day, it’ll all make sense—every wrong turn, every what-if, every night spent staring at the ceiling, wondering what is next. It’ll all add up to something.” As Grace speaks, her fingers loopthrough her necklace chain and then, as if by instinct, glide over the charm and trace the letters of her name. “I’d vow that even when it feels impossible, a better version of her waits up ahead.” Her peach-glossed lips lift into a soft smile as she lowers her hand and touches her wedding band one more time. “If she just trusts herself, really listens and pays attention to all the signs—even when she’s scared and doesn’t know where she’s going—eventually, she’ll find her way,” she concludes, her voice brimming with conviction she doesn’t know is misplaced.
Because there is one thingthisGrace—so poised, so pleased, so polished, so full of belief, and so sure of her footing—doesn’t yet fully comprehend.
In life, nothing is certain.
Things once found can still go missing.
Despite our best efforts to hold on to them, they can become lost all over again.
Part One
Today
One
Five Years Later ...
Friday
If someone had asked Grace Elizabeth Whittaker (née Porter) five years earlier to predict what her life would look like at thirty-seven, she’d have replied with ease.
She’d be married, obviously. A mother, too—the suburban type who baked banana bread and hosted a book club but still knew how to navigate Grand Central when the occasion called. She’d be a novelist, of course, with an ever-growing list of back titles and more on the way. Most important? She’d have prophesized that she’d be happy. More than happy. Fulfilled. Settled—the good kind, when it feels like you’ve finally exhaled after spending far too long holding your breath.
But that was all in her head.
In real life, things don’t always go according to plan.
Breathe,Grace reminds herself. Not for the first time today. This hour. This minute.
Lately, it’s what everyone tells her to do—the whole world newly invested in her oxygen intake. There’s her therapist, Dr. Anne. Thewomen in her grief group. The authors of the self-help books currently cluttering up her nightstand like a confused shrine. Even her phone sends her daily reminders to pause,inhale, and reflect.
It’s no use. Her voice, like so many things she thought she’d have forever, is gone.
“Come on, Grace,” she says aloud, as if her creativity just requires some gentle coaxing. “You’ve done this before. You can do it again,” she whispers, but her tone sounds thin.
She shifts her gaze away from the blinking cursor on her computer screen, its electronic pulse a depressing metronome, and over to the collection of wilting houseplants on the corner of her desk. A podcast she listened to falsely promised that they’d expedite her healing. She flicks a brittle leaf. Just like all the others this morning, it soundlessly falls.
With a quiet sigh, she sweeps the debris into her hand and tosses it into the wastebasket—a brief moment of productivity before she drags her attention back to her nearly blank document.
“You have until mid-September,” she says. “Four weeks to write a book practically from scratch.” Her fingers hover over the keyboard. They wait like a row of sprinters eager to hear a starting gun. “One last chance to prove you’re still yourself.”
Like always, this is where her pep talk ends. The thought of beginning—of trying again—seems insurmountable. Burdensome. Impossible. Like being handed a boulder and then told to swim upstream.
Once upon a time, writing came organically to Grace. The whole process was fluid. Easy. Most days, the words poured from her mind and onto the page before she could even process them. Back in her late twenties, she wrote the first draft of her debut novel,The Tides, in a series of sprints. On weekend mornings—free from the rigmarole of her full-time copywriting job on Forty-Second Street—she’d peel open her laptop, start to type, and then suddenly find the moon pasted in thesky. Hours vanished in a blink. Characters appeared. Both in her story and her life, problems were solved.
Now Grace lifts her hands. She adjusts the blanket draped over her shoulders while, inside her mind, a memory stirs.
“You were made for this, Cece,” her mother, a longtime English teacher, used to say. “You’re a natural.” Birdie was always Grace’s first reader, whether Grace was thirteen or eighteen or twenty-two. “You have something important to say, my love,” she’d add, her voice certain and warm. “Promise me you won’t stop until you’ve said it.”
Those days feel like a long time ago.
Her knee tucked against her chest, Grace looks up at the window. Outside, the world is a postcard of August. Golden sunlight. Blue sky. Green trees. Children coasting on bikes, their laughter audible even through the glass. It’s the type of day that, in a past life, Grace would have darted outside, determined not to waste a second of it. Presently, her body remains still, as if she’s physically tethered to these feelings—to this whole room.
“So what do you think?” she asks the air. “Any chance I can get a sign?” A strand of hair comes loose from her ponytail. “I’ll take anything. A gust of wind. A flickering light. Just give mesomethingso I know where to take this story.” She blows the unruly piece away, but it falls again. “Or maybe my entire life.”
Grace grew up in a house where signs mattered. Seeing a cardinal on the windowsill. Randomly waking up at 3:00 a.m. Hearing certain songs play. Walking through the surf and discovering whole sand dollars washing up at your feet. They meant someone was watching over you. Helping to guide you. That you weren’t alone, even when you felt like it.
“Well?” she presses. “Anything?”
