An audio book.
Cecilia has found an enveloped letter for her from her husband, John Paul, "to be opened after I die". He's away, so she phones him before opening it. He's embarrassed about it. They have 3 young daughters. Polly is 6 and beautiful. Ester, 10, lurches from one booky obsession to another (currently the Berlin Wall). Isobel is 12. Celicia witnessed a child die in a car accident a while before. Cecilia does Tupelware parties. She and John Paul have not had sex for 6 months or so.
Will and Tess have a son Liam, 6. Tess's cousin Felicity has lost 40kg. Felicity and Will have just told Tess that they're in love. Tess flies back to Sydney (where John Paul went to school) taking Liam with her. Tess thinks about sex. She meets an old boyfriend, Connor, sleeping with him after their first coffee. Lucy (who's broken her ankle) is Tess's mother.
Rob and Lauren and little son Jacob are visiting Rob's widowed mother Rachel with news. They're going to New York for 2 years. There's a flashback to when Janie (Rachel and Ed's daughter) was 18 - the day of her death. The story of that day progresses in small bursts during the main timeline. Rachel had been late picking up Janie on that final day because she'd been flirting with a colleague. She's a secreatary at the school where Connor is a teacher and Liam has become a pupil. Polly goes to the same school and want to invite Connor to her party.
When Ester and Polly are in the car with Cecilia, Ester wonders what would have happened if the Berlin Wall went up when her mother was on one side, and her father on the other. Polly says she saw dad crying in the shower, and he looks strangely at Isobel. Celilia wonders briefly if John Paul is gay or a paedophile, then recalls that he tried suicide when he was a student.
Rachel finds a video that makes her even more sure that Connor killed her daughter.
John Paul returns 3 days early. They make love. He searches for the letter but she's moved it. She reads it. It's a confession that he killed Janie after she broke off their secret relationship. John Paul says that his non-sex was a sort of self-harm, that his crying was because Isobel reminded him of Janie. Celicia deals with the news surprisingly well. She thinks about the Berlin people who died for freedom, and wonders whether Janie's dying was worth it. She meets John Paul's mother Virginia and suspects she too knows that John Paul is the murderer.
Felicity turns up at Tess's to tell her it's over. Will turns up to explain and apologise. This is the least convincing of a number of surprising emotional reactions in the novel.
Rachel tries to run over Connor but Polly is cycling fast towards Connor and is knocked over instead. Her right hand has to be amputated. When Rachel meets Cecilia, Celicia confesses to tying to kill Connor. Cecilia tells her that John Paul did it. Celicia later thinks that Rachel won't tell the police about John Paul because Cecilia would tell them about Rachel. And anyway, John Paul has now had his punishment.
There's an epilogue of what-ifs - Janie would have been diagnosed to have a potentially fatal genetic flaw and could have died at any moment. Polly would have gone on to excel at tennis. Tess will have a child - but whose?
Some of the phrasing doesn't sound right to me - "She sometimes thought to herself"; "smiling to himself"; "She noticed that her hand was visibily trembling".
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