Hello Beautiful: THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

She had watched her mother stick out her own marriage, and that path wasn’t for Julia.

“And she’s out,” Emeline said, because Izzy had fallen asleep. The little girl’s expression was serious, as if her unconscious mind was contemplating difficult problems: how to optimize budget deficits in a modern economy, perhaps, or whether free will is compatible with determinism.

She’d become worried that it was her father’s attention that kept her intact, kept her Sylvie, and she felt great sympathy now for her brother-in-law. Sylvie had been feeling this way for only a month, and it was terrible. The size of this manuscript, and the effort in its pages, showed that William had been in this place for a long time.

The stock market had crashed earlier that fall, and Alice thought the ladders her mother valued so highly were made of rotten wood.

The girls’ only genuine beliefs, growing up, had been in fictional characters and their games and one another.

Sylvie said, “I’m right here,” but her mother gave no indication of having heard her, and Sylvie wondered if maybe she wasn’t right here. Her certainty wavered, and with it her sense of self. Sylvie had the sensation of fading away in her black dress and tights. Under Charlie’s gaze, Sylvie had been whole; now, in front of her mother, she was porou

It wasn’t just their height that was arresting but the purpose with which the men walked. They moved as the team they’d been in college—matching strides, taking directional cues from one another.

Sylvie wondered, looking at the mural, if bravery was wedded to loss: You did the unthinkable thing and paid a price.

that her shadow had gotten a mind of its own; a few times she caught it pulling away from her, as if it were trying to escape.