City, where Kim had moved to be closer to work and to her sisters. Jo and Shelley helped with the cooking and cleaning and shopping. They’d become pros at riding the subway, escorting the girls to swim team and Hebrew school and cooking classes. Kim worked and struggled and stretched herself thin, the way all working mothers did. She felt guilty for enjoying her job, and she felt guilty when she missed some milestone, or when Jo and Shelley had to attend a choir concert or a parent-teacher conference or a doctor’s visit in her stead. You’re doing the best you can, Jo would tell her, over and over, and refrain from pointing out that Matt never seemed to torment himself when he was golfing the first time Flora rode her bike on her own, or reading the paper during Leonie’s first successful dive into the deep end. Women had made progress—Jo only had to look as far as the television set to see it—but she wondered whether they would ever not try to have it all and do it all and do all of it flawlessly. Would the day ever come when simply doing your best would be enough? Her generation hadn’t managed it, and neither had her daughters. Maybe Flora and Leonie and their classmates and cousins would be the lucky ones.
“We lost ourselves,” she said. Her voice sounded sludgy and slow, and she must have fallen asleep, because the slant of light on her quilt had shifted. Flora and Leonie had disappeared, and Kim was the one at her bedside.
“What did you say, Mom?”
Jo’s eyes prickled with tears, and her face flushed with the effort of remembering. Oh, there was so little time left, and so much more that she wanted to say! “We lose ourselves,” she repeated, forming each word with care, “but we find our way back.” Wasn’t that the story of her life? Wasn’t that the story of Bethie’s? You make the wrong choices, you make mistakes, you disappear for a decade, you marry the wrong man. You get hurt. You lose sight of who you are, or of who you want to be, and then you remember, and if you’re lucky you have sisters or friends who remind you when you forget your best intentions. You come back to yourself, again and again. You try, and fail, and try again, and fail again. She understood why Kim had married Matt, and why she’d left him. She understood how Melissa had failed Lila, and how Lila had hurt Missy. Try and fail and try again.
She held her daughter’s hand and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, Bethie had taken Shelley’s place in the chair next to her bed, a cup of tea that smelled of grass and lemon balm was steaming on the table, and Melissa was standing in the doorway.
“Hi,” Jo said, pushing herself upright. Melissa looked awful, pale and drawn and tired. “What’s wrong?”
Melissa looked weary, the way she had for years. Lester Shaub’s fall had followed the pattern set by many of his fellow moguls, captains of industry, and CEOs. It had happened gradually, then all at once. A whisper here, a rumor there, and then one of the authors had filed a lawsuit, the HR director’s records had been subpoenaed, and it turned out that, over the years, there’d been dozens of allegations, ranging from unwanted touches and kisses to rape. Lester, it emerged, also had instituted what the gossips delighted in calling a blow-jobs-for-blurbs policy, which explained why so many female authors’ debut novels came ornamented with praise by one or another of Lester’s stable of elderly literary giants, encomiums that turned out to have been written by Lester himself.
Through it all, Missy had stood by him, the staunch defender, the loyal soldier. “That isn’t the Lester I know,” she would say, telling reporters that Lester had never been inappropriate with her, pointing out the ranks of female authors he’d discovered and published and promoted. “Just because it wasn’t happening to you doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening,” one reporter had said, and Missy, shrugging, had said, “All I can tell you is what I know. Look, everyone’s out there shouting, ‘Believe women.’ Well, I’m a woman, too.” Jo had never mentioned Lila’s story to Missy. The year of Lester’s professional demise, she’d let others host the holidays, happy to have Kim at her in-laws’ and Missy with friends and Lila wherever Lila went, while she and Shelley