Chapters (51)
- Cover
- Praise for Sara Shepard
- Also by Sara Shepard
- Dedication
- PART ONE
- —
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- PART TWO
- Piper
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Piper
- Eighteen
- Piper
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Piper
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Piper
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Piper
- Thirty-Four
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- What’s next onyour reading list?
And maybe Lauren’s family was seventies-sitcom perfect. All five Lowry kids set up homework stations at the dining room table, and Lauren never had a room of her own, and yet her mother always managed to find the perfect Christmas present for each of them. There were summers on the Cape, cheering on her brothers at soccer games, sitting through her sister’s school plays. While her older sisters were “the pretty one” and the “theatrical one” and her brothers were both athletes, Lauren was “the brainy one,” which wasn’t exactly a compliment. She went to science camps every summer, and she was part of a nerdy band of kids who played a lot of D&D and fantasy video games. She always felt a little out of step with her siblings, who had an easy knowledge of pop culture and how to act in social situations and who, in adulthood, settled into lives not unlike their parents’. Her sister Gwen lived not ten miles from where they grew up and was a stay-at-home mom, her husband a prestigious doctor. Her sister Mel lived in New Jersey with her two kids, now almost teenagers, and dabbled with a bunch of careers as hobbies, not because she needed the money. Her brothers had blond, pretty-enough wives who faded into the background and fell into their typical gender roles. It was like the seventies, including how they all looked at Lauren a little pityingly because she hadn’t made the same choices.
But Lauren’s braininess had served her well: after college at UC Santa Cruz, she got into tech, finding coding languages easier to master than German or French. She put her love of gaming to use and developed a game app called Huzzah!, a Candy Crush–like color-matching puzzle that featured elves and sprites. The game garnered a following, and then she helped make Huzzah! 2, and then both games were set to be purchased by a big developer in Silicon Valley for wide distribution. Thanks to a business-minded friend, she’d lawyered up and secured rights to both properties. The sale of the games would earn her a decent nest egg, enough so that she didn’t have to figure out her next steps for a while. Right around that time, she’d met Graham.