Marisa de los Santos

Cornelia Brown is reeling from a terrifying act of violence when she gets word that her mother has been badly injured in an accident. Cornelia returns to Virginia, to the house she grew up in, and in the weeks that follow, she watches her mother Ellie struggle to recover, fluctuating between her usual crisp, can-do clarity and periods of delirium during which she seems haunted by a devastating loss from her past. In grief-stricken tones, Ellie begs...

Ginny Beale is eighteen, irreverent, funny, and brave, with a brother she adores and a circle of friends for whom she would do anything. Because of one terrible night, she loses them all, and her adventurous spirit, seemingly forever. While the town cheers on the high school football team, someone sets the school's auditorium ablaze. Ginny's best friend Gray Marsden's father, a fire fighter, dies in the blaze. While many in the town believe a notoriously...

Pen Calloway, estranged from her college friends Cat and Will for six years, has missed them through the birth of her daughter, the death of her father, and the struggles of single motherhood, and must decide how far she will go to get her friends back in her life after Cat ends the silence between them with an urgent summons to a college reunion.

A tale told in alternating voices traces the collaborative efforts of an estranged millionaire father and the daughter he abandoned 17 years earlier to reconcile and write his memoir.