When Anna Graham finds diamond earrings in her husband’s drawer the day before Valentine’s Day, she knows they’re not for her – her ears aren’t even pierced. Gray is having an affair – but before she can confront him about his betrayal, he receives a terminal cancer diagnosis that shatters their family.
As Gray lies dying in their Damask Square home, Anna meets Laurel – the nurse who stole her husband’s heart. Despite her rage, Anna finds herself sharing Gray’s final days with this other woman, both desperate to ease his suffering while drowning in their own grief.
But hidden in their loft, Anna discovers traces of a stranger – a boy who was a gifted pianist, who had a different life before he became her husband. As she struggles to hold herself together for her teenage children, Anna realises everything she believed about Gray was built on carefully constructed lies.
Can two women who loved the same man find a way to heal – and help each other discover who Gray really was?
"I imagined the earrings there, sparkling against my skin. I imagined telling people, smiling, Yes, they were a gift from Gray, and them thinking, Lucky woman - he must be mad about her, even after these years. But they weren't mine. I was not that lucky woman and it wasn't me that my husband was mad about. Apparently."
Sophie Ranald has been on my auto-read list for some time now, because I've always found her romcoms so much fun, full of exactly what I wanted from the stories and always a great experience. So I was so excited when she popped up with a second story exploring a brand new style for me to love with this adult fiction exploring family, grief and loss. But at it's heart, it's still about what all of Sophie's stories are about - love - just from a new perspective.
The star of the show was the characters, each with their own part to play, their own fears, damage and losses to navigate. They led us through the narrative thoughtfully, with lots of reflection and introspection that really let the reader get under their skin and experience every high and low with them.
It's slow moving, existing in the little moments that still happen between life-changing revelations and capturing the strange way time stills in the aftermath of trauma. I usually have fatigue about stories that use a terminal illness as a plot point in a storyline now, but I loved the way this story used it to explore the complicated emotions of grieving the loss of someone who has hurt you. Love and hatred, anger and sadness mixing together in a confusion way that leaves you unsure if you can be angry, or sad.
Anna and Laurel both showed us different sides of Grey, letting us bond with both of them so that it's hard to 'choose a side' or immediately hating Laurel for being the other woman. Then we get a third external perspective from a familiar neighbour, watching from the outside and piecing everything together with us.
A striking, emotional story about starting again.
- All the things we never knew will be available from today, I receivied a reviewers copy of this title.
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