Mothers and Other Strangers

by Corey Ann Haydu

Genres: Family Life; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

For readers of Claire Lombardo and J. Courtney Sullivan, a moving and surprising story about two women, best friends since childhood, who reunite as expectant mothers after a mysterious falling out between their mothers (also best friends) keeps them apart for years—and who must finally contend with the secrets between them.

When Sydney and Mae meet on the playground as toddlers, it seems like kismet. Even their very different mothers—the type-A Beth Ann and the free-spirited Joni—agree the girls are made for each other, and it's not long before even the mothers become inseparable.
 
Then a falling out draws them apart, and decades later, the loneliness still lingers for the newly pregnant Sydney. Adrift in the absence of her closest friend, Sydney has been drawn into a Multi-Level Marketing scheme, exacerbated by the demands of her inflexible mother, Beth Ann, whose constant scrutiny seems reserved only for her daughter.
 
Across the city, Mae is stunned to find herself single, pregnant, and still haunted by the loss of her mercurial late mother, Joni, whose mysterious death holds as many unanswered questions as Mae does herself. Mae is an artist who has lived under the shadow of the one painting (of two girls) that made her famous years ago, the success of which confines as much as it defines her.
 
When Sydney and Mae find themselves back in one another’s lives, each with a baby girl on the horizon, it once again seems like destiny. Each begins to pull the other away from the coercive influence of outsiders—mommy groups, marketing schemes, artistic pressures, and ex-boyfriends. But the two women will soon discover that it’s not destiny that has drawn them together this time, but a devastating secret at the center of their orbits—a truth that finally will bind them or shatter them, for good.
 
An intimate and searing novel about mothers and daughters, and destiny and desire, MOTHERS AND OTHER STRANGERS takes a full-hearted look at those relationships in life that are as impossible as they are utterly essential.

Release date: March 31, 2026

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 288

Sample

MAE WAS GOING up the slide and Sydney was coming down it at preschool pickup that first day. They were both in pink leggings, sporting bowl haircuts and big smiles, and at that age, that’s really all you need to become best friends. Sydney liked Mae’s sparkly headband. Mae liked Sydney’s unicorn T-shirt. By the time their mothers picked them up in the sweaty afternoon sun, they were holding hands and begging to go to an entirely different playground together.

Mae’s mother, Joni, said yes in the same sleepy breath as Sydney’s mother, Beth Ann, said no, and for a moment the disagreement felt charged, uncomfortable, like something they would all have to work to find their way out of. Difference was like that sometimes—thick and strange and creating distinct paths forward. It was a kind of tension not unlike when the working moms went back to the office after a few months of stretchy, impossible, beautiful newborn days. The stay-at-home moms dug in their heels and said goodbye to the women who had taken the shape of friends for that brief period, women they promised to stay in touch with but wouldn’t. And a small group of moms lived in between—work-from-home administrators and freelance writers and wedding photographers and struggling actors whose auditions were drying up but were not gone, not entirely. Moms who could go to the occasional baby-and-me music class but also lived in the impossible push-pull of work and children, the desire to succeed for them and in spite of them and because of them.

The first moment between Joni and Beth Ann was like that, a sort of reckoning: What kind of mother are you? What kind of woman does that mean you are? And what does that mean for our ability to sit at the playground side by side and watch our children navigate who gets to go first on the slide, who can go higher on the jungle gym, whose hair is longer, whose doll needs to be fed more pine cones?

But it was only for a moment. A big breath that took in the way their daughters leaned toward each other, seemed to sparkle a little in each other’s presence, looked easy, tantrum-less, not poised to demand snacks at the loud decibel three-year-olds were known for. In that breath Joni and Beth Ann saw the same thing—that their girls looked the way they themselves recalled feeling as children, at least when they were remembering the best of childhood—the messy-haired, scraped-kneed, dancing-to-scratchy-records-in-the-den, squealing-at-the-perfect-hiding-spot-for-hide-and-seek, eating-popcorn-from-a-big-bowl-and-finding-barely-an-unpopped-kernel-at-the-bottom parts of childhood that were so sweet and boring and nostalgic that it was easy to wonder if they’d ever existed at all.

So much could happen in a breath between three-year-olds and their tired, trying, taut mothers.

“It’s a little windy for the playground, isn’t it?” Beth Ann said, partly to herself, partly to Joni, partly to Sydney in the conspiratorial way she was often saying things to her daughter. Beth Ann, Joni would come to understand, was always trying to make Sydney agree with her about things like the weather.

“We hate wind,” Sydney said. Beth Ann nodded, not so much in agreement but with pride that Sydney had said the right thing, knew her script so precisely.

“Okay,” Joni said, looking for the right response, “well, I guess I’ve never given it much thought. Have you, Mae?”

“Poop!” Mae said with a smile so wide and buoyant it seemed to be willing itself to overflow right off her face. She laughed then, a sound that reminded Joni of all things light and airy and delicious—pink cupcakes and fluffy clouds and enormous puffs of spun-sugar cotton candy.

“Well,” Beth Ann said, an admonition, surely, of Mae’s exclamation, maybe even of Mae’s unleashed laughter, so big and bold it had wrapped Sydney up as well. Sydney was giggling now too while glancing up at her mother to see if it was okay.

Sydney looked, Joni noted, extremely unbothered by the wind.

“There’s a nice playground right around the corner,” Joni said, her insistent sunniness poking its way through the unsettled feeling between the two mothers, breaking the breath, bringing them all back to the moment. “I’ve never noticed it being especially windy there. And I have an extra scarf if you need it.” She dug in her canvas tote and pulled out something she’d knit herself—yellow-and-blue-striped, soft, imperfect.

“Oh,” Beth Ann said, smiling thinly. “Pretty.” She pulled her lilac fleece jacket tightly around herself, zipped it all the way up. She tried to tuck her dark blown-out hair behind her ears but it kept flying around in the wind, undoing her prim part, making a mess of what was supposed to be neat and elegant and smooth.

Joni’s light brown hair was braided and pinned up like a suburban milkmaid’s, and there was something about her skirt’s length (long) and style (patchwork floral) that seemed designed to make the other mothers uncomfortable. Mothers in Sommersette wore expensive jeans and navy-blue fleece jackets over tailored T-shirts. They made casual feel practiced. Safe. Uniform.

Joni’s skirt, braids, and lacy shirt exposing her bare shoulders were a middle finger to the Sommersette dress code, a fuck-you, honestly, to the other parents at pickup, implying she knew something they didn’t. For the first of a thousand times to come, Beth Ann considered asking Joni why in the world she’d moved here, to a place that she so obviously didn’t belong in. A place that Joni—Beth Ann could tell from the way she started every other sentence with the phrase In the city, we used to—didn’t even seem to want to be. By the end of the afternoon, Beth Ann would learn the names of three bars in the East Village, a great French bistro in SoHo, “the best” thrift store in Brooklyn.

Beth Ann would never go to any of these places.

“Didn’t they essentially just spend the whole day at a playground?” Beth Ann asked, gesturing to the redbrick preschool and its front yard—the shiny slide, the overly elaborate climbing apparatus, the swings that didn’t squeak yet but inevitably would someday soon. There was a list of things Beth Ann had planned to do this afternoon. Mail something at the post office. Stop by the ballet studio to see if they took kids Sydney’s age. Enlist Sydney’s sticky hands to help make something for dinner.

“So one more hour is probably harmless,” Joni said with a shrug that covered up the rest of the things she probably wanted to say but was choosing not to.

“Harmless isn’t the same as enjoyable,” Beth Ann said.

“No,” Joni agreed. “It’s not.” She shrugged again. There was a lot about being Mae’s mother that wasn’t exactly enjoyable but was more or less harmless. Living in this town, for instance, pretending it was enough, pretending it was anything other than a place where people spent money and showed off and bitched about one another’s parking skills and haircuts and garden designs.

Joni and her husband, Graham, had once upon a time discussed living in Portland or staying in New York City. She’d made a play for Paris or Amsterdam or buying an RV and adventuring around the country. It had all seemed so possible back in the day, back when they had been mapping out their lives together lying atop the quilt Graham’s mother had made him for his college dorm and that had become an integral part of his bedroom aesthetic in the years since then, charming Joni and probably a dozen girls before her, because who didn’t love a guy who unabashedly loved his mom?

But then there was Mae.

Joni had been the one to bring up leaving the city, a fact that stunned her city friends, who were all raising their children in tiny apartments, hauling strollers up three flights of stairs, buying plastic storage bins that stacked on top of each other in whatever closet spaces were available, abandoning the idea of a backyard and claiming that a rooftop or a terrace or the neighborhood playground was enough.

And maybe it was.

But Joni had had her eye on Sommersette from the moment she felt a lurch in her stomach and a soreness to her breasts that would someday, somehow, turn into Mae.

“I thought you hated suburbs,” Graham had said, suspicious of the house listings she’d sent him, the remarkable way Joni seemed to suddenly know everything there was to know about suburban school districts and finished basements.

“I’m trying to be less judgmental,” Joni replied. “Sommersette is artsy. For suburbia, at least. Their movie theater shows indies. I know a children’s-book illustrator who moved there a few years ago. There’s a bar that plays pretty good jazz, apparently. A lot of transplants from the city.”

Graham adjusted his glasses like maybe they were the problem. But nope, it was still Joni in front of him. She was asking him for something he’d always sort of wanted, so who was he to fight against it? Before they got married, his father had warned him about the way people changed over the years and how marriage was about hoping you’d grow together and not apart. And perhaps it had happened, Graham thought, just the way he’d hoped. Joni had changed, but in a good way, a way that made their marriage stronger, their lives more in sync.

So they bought the house with the tall ceilings and the window seat that Joni fell a little in love with, and she promised Graham that the window seat would be enough for her. She liked the lushness of the backyard and the quiet of the street. And she did love that window seat, wide enough for her and her belly and her cats and a pile of books. They did a major renovation of the kitchen, the primary bedroom, all three bathrooms. It took longer than expected, the way these things often do, but they did it, and by the time they arrived there, Mae was old enough to take a pile of picture books up to the window seat herself and flip through them, making up stories, repeating memorized phrases. She did it often, and each time it gave Joni a bit of hope that they were in the right place, that they’d done the right thing.

Sommersette wasn’t the city, with its shrieking sirens and possibilities, but it was fine. Joni was fine. Sommersette wasn’t special, but it was harmless.

So it felt strange to Joni that Beth Ann was saying that harmless wasn’t the same as enjoyable. Of course it wasn’t. She wondered if Beth Ann’s life was limited to things she enjoyed, if she hadn’t made the sorts of compromises that Joni had in motherhood—if somehow Beth Ann’s version would fit Joni better, even though it looked sadder, more stripped of personality. She would’ve asked her, but Beth Ann didn’t seem like a woman who responded well to questions about how she was doing and what she felt and what it meant to live in a beautiful home and have a beautiful child and feel unmistakably wrong in it all.

Maybe, Joni thought, Beth Ann had other things that made her life feel fuller, more anchored. A job. A time-consuming hobby. An affair.

The idea made Joni smile.

Beth Ann was pretty in a conventional way, but brusque, and Joni knew that really any sort of woman might have an affair. Any sort of woman might have any number of secrets. She hoped that Beth Ann had a few.

They hadn’t reached an agreement about the playground, their conversation having halted as the girls chattered on in the way three-year-olds did, in a sort of cobbled-together language that was filled with slurry sentences and odd grammatical errors and heartbreaking little stutters and repetitions and struggles to get out the right words in the right order.

Out of that cacophony, however, the girls sang a squeaky Pleeeeeeease in desperate toddler harmony, and the mothers, both of them in different ways and for different reasons, fell in love with the way Sydney and Mae were together, the way each of them bent and unbent their knees like they might leap off the surface of the earth at any moment; the way their hands were clasped so tightly together that the naked eye could see the strain, the effort of it; the way neither ever wanted to let go of the other. They both had strands of baby hair in their eyes and grass stains in the strangest places—chins and shoulders and stomachs—and smiles that straddled the line between darling and devilish. Smiles that Joni and Beth Ann both loved and feared.

“Who knows, maybe it will be a little enjoyable after all,” Joni said, because this was when mothering in Sommersette didn’t feel like a lie or a burden or a sad shadow of the way things had been in her head. Mae’s joy—at watching the gymnastic stylings of monkeys at the local zoo; at the feeling of dirt under her fingers when she worked in the garden with Joni, overwatering hardy plants that would probably not survive her exquisite love; the rush of Daddy, Daddy, Daddy that erupted from her when Graham came home—was a sort of drug. Mae’s joy made the hard days better, made the decision to live here feel sturdier.

And maybe that was true for all parents. Beth Ann smiled at Joni, her eyes crinkling in the corners briefly before she seemed to correct them. “Playground it is,” she said, reimagining dinner as a cheese-and-apple sandwich and a small salad, the sort of meal her husband, Barrett, would grudgingly accept but have some questions about: Why such a simple dinner, what were you up to, did you forget to do a grocery run, wasn’t Sydney in school today, are there any leftovers? It would be hard to offer We went to the playground with that artsy woman who finally moved into that house down the street that was bought a few years back and her daughter, who is now, apparently, Sydney’s best friend to her husband, but he also wouldn’t stay on it for long. He never did.

The girls ran off as soon as they arrived at the playground, and Beth Ann started to settle onto a bench.

“Can we move over here?” Joni asked, pointing to another empty spot. “Farther away from the trash cans—bees are always hovering by the trash. I’m allergic.” She smiled like it was something whimsical and tragic about her. Joni had a way of making every fact about herself seem meaningful. Profound. Beth Ann would find herself surprised to be jealous of Joni’s allergy to bees, her preference for butter rather than cream cheese on her bagels, her collection of beat-up bookstore tote bags, how she used a regular mug instead of a travel one when she went for a walk in the mornings.

Beth Ann had the opportunity to take note of every tiny thing about Joni, because within days, Joni, Mae, Beth Ann, and Sydney had entered into a new routine, carpooling to school in the mornings, going to the playground after school. It was harmless. Or enjoyable. Or something in between, shaded with the anxiety of befriending someone new and wondering what exact role that person might end up playing in your life.

The slurpy r’s and swishy s’s of the girls’ speech drifted into the women’s homes, cars, backyards, lives. Always, Mae and Sydney were talking.

When they were three, Sydney and Mae talked mostly about princesses.

When they were four, it was witches and monsters.

And when they were five, it was the dollhouse.

For years and years after, it was mostly the dollhouse. Even as teenagers Sydney and Mae spent whole afternoons with that dollhouse. Not that they would ever have told their friends, who smoked cigarettes and kissed boys and, later, had sex with those same boys or slightly different ones from better or bigger or more Catholic schools in the backs of used cars.

The dollhouse lived in Sydney’s home, but it was Mae who made it something special. Mae had an ease with things like glue and paint and scissors and knew instinctively where a tiny couch fit best in relation to a tiny armchair.

“Already an artist, isn’t she?” Beth Ann asked Joni once when the two women were enjoying coffee while their seven-year-old girls fought over what color carpet to put in the tiny plastic baby doll’s room. Over the years, Joni and Beth Ann, too, had fallen into an unexpected best-friendship. It wasn’t a friendship grown from interests or even connection, but it was, by the time the girls were seven, a friendship that felt large and stable and familial and right. If asked, Beth Ann would have said, with a self-deprecating laugh, that, yes, Joni, the one with the skirts and the nose ring and the messy yard, was her best friend. Joni would have said the same, shrugging in a sort of surrender to the way things were in a place like Sommersette. Beth Ann wasn’t exactly cool. Or even necessarily interesting. But she was easy to be around and made a great cheese plate and didn’t judge an early-afternoon glass of wine or Mae’s way of ever so slightly bossing Sydney around, poking her, shoving her once in a while, hitting her a few times. Beth Ann bought Joni’s favorite brand of tea to always have on hand, and read the paper and even a novel here and there, and still invited Mae over for playdates even after she cut the hair off Sydney’s favorite doll, broke a delicate vase, experimented with the word bitch on one occasion.

Some evenings, Graham laughed, bemused, at stories Joni told about prim and proper Beth Ann, but he was happy Joni had found someone to spend time with. It was only Barrett who was prickly about the friendship. But then Barrett was prickly about a great many things, from overdone steaks to un-ironed shirts to the way that both Sydney and Beth Ann left wet towels in the bathroom, spent too much money on manicures and fancy dresses, preferred watching movies on the couch to hiking the nearby trails that Barrett was always dragging them to.

Beth Ann had been in the middle of complaining about one such hike when seven-year-old Mae came to Joni’s side with a bit of paper upon which she’d painted a tiny still life: apples and oranges in a bowl. She was making a frame for it with pipe cleaners and wanted to show her mother her accomplishment. It was always this way, Mae making something surprisingly perfect, then bouncing into the room to show it off, while Sydney slogged behind, ready to show some other, much lesser item.

The mothers gave the requisite compliments and sent the girls on their way again, but before they were completely out of earshot, Beth Ann couldn’t stop herself from saying, again, “What a talent. She’s an artistic prodigy, that kid of yours.”

“Well, you know, apple and tree,” Joni said. It always felt like she had to remind people that she was the real artist in the family, not her precocious child, who from the age of four had been getting outsize attention for her coloring, gluing, renderings of mermaids and family members and gardens, and, every so often, when things were unraveling, feelings.

“Right,” Beth Ann said, “of course.”

But Beth Ann didn’t ask Joni what she’d been working on in the backyard or compliment the new painting that surely by now she’d caught sight of in the front hall. She didn’t extend the compliment of artistry to Joni herself, even though, as Joni saw it, Mae’s abilities were simply extensions of her own genetics—proof of her own prodigious talents, her own undeniable artistic identity.

“It must be fun to see her shine,” Beth Ann said instead, another way of drawing attention only to Mae, only ever to Mae, who was slight and scrawny but still managed to take up so much space.

“I’m glad we have something in common,” Joni said, trying again to carve out her own importance but getting only a tight-lipped smile from Beth Ann in response. Neither woman was working in those days, and it made them both unsteady, though they’d never say it out loud. Instead, Beth Ann was in the habit of listing all the tasks she had to get done in a particular day, as if she needed to prove her worth through errands, and Joni found moments to remind Beth Ann of all the jobs she’d once done, or could be doing, or would someday do again. Artist. Waitress. Writer. Administrative assistant. Music therapist.

“Sydney has other talents,” Beth Ann said at last, worried momentarily that the girls might be hearing their conversation.

“Oh, of course,” Joni agreed.

And they were both sure this would someday be true.

Upstairs, though, the girls were not listening at all, were never listening to the goings-on of grown-ups in the house. They’d moved on from paintings and pipe cleaners to address more pressing matters. There was currently the issue of how to carpet the baby’s room in the dollhouse. Sydney liked a pale blue with stripes and Mae was arguing for a golden paisley pattern, and they had reached an impasse.

“It’s my dollhouse,” Sydney said after Mae had given an impassioned speech about how golden paisley was special and blue stripes were boring. “So it’s really my choice anyway.”

“You usually say it’s ours,” Mae responded. “That we share it. That’s, like, your favorite saying.” Mae didn’t mind a fight. She was good at them—sure enough about almost anything to take a stand, and she liked the rush of adrenaline, the way her brain would shut off and her mouth and limbs and heart would take over, shouting and shaking and drumming. Even at seven, she sometimes hunted for something to explode about—an unflattering haircut, a disgusting dinner food that her mother knew she hated, a playground injustice involving a missed turn or an ignored rule.

While Mae liked the explosive feeling of provoking and defending and demanding, Sydney liked the simpler, cozier feeling of being the victim. She liked the stillness of it, the way she could close her eyes and sigh and have everyone worry about her.

“I mean, it’s ours, but really it’s mine,” Sydney said. She let her shoulder shrug, her eyes lower, like maybe it was embarrassing to have to have this conversation at all. “I mean, it’s here. My dad bought it for me. So I guess it’s ours, but he’d probably be really upset if you made all the decorating decisions. Because, like, he did buy it for me, you know?”

“Your dad would be upset? About the dollhouse?” Mae’s eyebrows spiked. She scoffed. Her own father barely knew what toys she owned, let alone where they were or what was done with them. She found it hard to imagine that Sydney had some entirely different kind of father, one who was monitoring a dollhouse, one who was invested in miniature chairs, miniature pizza, miniature people living miniature lives.

“It was expensive,” Sydney tried.

“I know, obviously, that’s why I want it to look good!” Mae was not backing down. It felt good to be right and to make that rightness known.

Sydney stormed to the other side of the room and sat in grumpy silence.

“You always do this,” Mae said. “You always change the rules to get your way. I hate that striped carpet. It’s stupid. If you use that carpet, I’m never playing with the dollhouse again.”

“Good! Then I won’t have to listen to all your stupid ideas!”

“Your ideas are stupid!”

“No, yours are!”

It was at this stage, then and always, that the mothers appeared. Beth Ann and Joni used to wait before trudging up the stairs to mediate, but waiting it out had proved too dangerous over the years. Once, Mae punched Sydney in the arm. Sydney screamed and kicked her in the shins. Joni was frankly relieved that Sydney was showing signs of fight. Beth Ann was horrified at the act, but Joni tried to telegraph to Sydney that it was okay, good, even, to fight back if you were pushed too far. It was something she would need to know.

Joni suspected, for a variety of reasons, that Beth Ann was missing that fight.

But after the shin kick and an incident involving a remote control thrown against the wall, Joni and Beth Ann tacitly agreed to intervene as soon as the girls’ voices were loud enough to make one or the other of the mothers wince.

“Enough dollhouse,” Beth Ann said. She had a tired hitch to her voice and wanted nothing more than to finish her coffee in peace. She had been wanting nothing more than to finish her coffee in peace for the seven years since Sydney was born, and yet, almost always, she ended up with half a cup of cold coffee forgotten on the counter.

“But Mae thinks—” Sydney started.

“I said enough. You can try again another day.”

“You girls should play outside,” Joni said. Children were supposed to do well in the sunshine. They were supposed to need it and like it and play in it.

“Play what?” Mae asked. She crossed her arms over her chest.

“Yeah, play what?” Sydney asked, imitating her friend’s stance. And just like that, they were on one team again. They wouldn’t play outside, but they wouldn’t fight anymore that day either. They picked up a stack of Archie comics and settled on opposite ends of the couch. Over the course of an hour, they migrated to the center so they could peek over each other’s shoulders to see something funny Jughead did or what cool thing Veronica was wearing.

By the time the sun set, they were ready to eat burgers and spinach salads with their mothers at the kitchen table, and they were sunny and sweet and exactly the kind of daughters their mothers had envisioned when they’d first learned of their pregnancies. Sydney and Mae giggled. They leaned against their mothers’ shoulders. They said “Thank you” for scoops of chocolate ice cream and “I love you” when Beth Ann and Joni agreed to a sleepover.

That night, just before eleven, Beth Ann listened to them whisper their way to sleep. She was overwhelmed by Mae and Sydney’s closeness—the love and the rage and how big it all was, how subject to change, moment by moment. Who knew what they would be like when they woke up in the morning, how they might feel about each other after a night of dreaming, and what new joys and small tragedies would befall them that day.

It wasn’t like that with her and Joni. They sometimes shared something intimate—a strange thing an ex had once asked for during sex, the hit of pain from not receiving Mother’s Day wishes from their own mothers, a buried memory of the embarrassing way one had acted on a long-ago date with a guy who was a little too handsome, a rude thing one had said to a stranger in the supermarket who was taking too long to find the exact right avocado.

But there was a deeper-down closeness that they never found. Beth Ann was sure that if Joni ever convinced Graham to move back to the city or if Barrett took that job in Florida and moved everyone there, she and Joni would never speak to each other again.

Joni, meanwhile, figured they’d be together forever, even if their relationship seemed ill-fitting and strange, even if no one else understood it.

That night, when the girls were asleep in Sydney’s bedroom and Joni was down the street and probably reading tarot cards or drinking green tea or painting indecipherable abstracts that she showed in the gallery in town from time to time, Beth Ann would have liked to talk it all over with Barrett. The push and pull of having a best friend like Joni, the wanting and not-wanting her around. The wishing Joni would do something normal, like join a book club or get a manicure. She even would have liked to lie next to her husband and stare at the ceiling, worrying and then deciding not to worry about the water damage, the cracks, the places that looked like the whole house might come tumbling down if they weren’t careful.

She would have liked to talk about Sydney and Mae and the things they said to each other and the way the love still sparkled and settled around them like dust, like sunbeams, like the powdery snow everyone was always waiting for.

She would have liked to tell him about the job she’d impulsively applied for—nothing fancy, just a job at the local paper editing announcements about the Halloween parade, writing obituaries, remembering to put on coffee for the rest of the office.

She would have liked to tell him all about it.

But he still wasn’t home.

So Beth Ann lay in bed remembering that day four years before when she’d met Joni, when Sydney met Mae. It had seemed so small then, the decision to take the girls to the playground, the way Beth Ann and Joni hung back and let the girls fight over who went down the slide first. It had seemed a small thing to ask Joni where she’d grown up and to tell Joni she had one sister and two brothers. It could have been just one day that never turned into any other day. But instead, somehow, that one day had become her whole life.

SYDNEY TOOK THE dollhouse out of storage as soon as she found out she was having a girl. The nurse had left a voicemail notifying her of her baby’s sex, which seemed oddly informal for such enormous information. Sydney had listened to the message five times, worried that she’d misheard. It was strange to have concrete answers, to see a bit of the future taking shape. Okay, she thought. There will be tea parties. And dolls. And princesses. And the dollhouse.

There was only one way to bring up a girl, in Sydney’s opinion, only one outcome to this news, and that was a replication of her own childhood. The good parts, before the bad parts came. There will be a best friend. She’ll be artsy and bold and they’ll fight but they’ll also love really hard. They will hide away on winter afternoons in a basement or an attic and emerge with ideas and dreams that could only have been baked up between the two of them. It will be beautiful and ugly and strange and familiar.

The dollhouse, more than anything else, seemed like a vital part of the whole equation. It was in a storage u