The number one international best-selling author returns with an electrifying novel of devastating secrets and hidden lives that probes the fraught relationship between daughters and mothers and the lengths we go to protect those we love.
What if the person you thought you knew best turns out to be someone you never knew at all? Andrea Cooper knows everything about her mother, Laura. She knows Laura has spent nearly her whole life in the small beach town of Belle Isle, Georgia; she knows Laura's never wanted anything more than to lead a quiet, normal life in this conventional community; she knows Laura's a kind and beloved speech pathologist who helps others; she knows Laura's never kept a secret in her life. Andrea knows that Laura is everything she isn't—confident, settled, sure of herself. Feeling listless, with no direction, Andrea, unlike Laura, struggles to find her way.
But Andrea's certainty is upended when a visit to the mall is shattered by an act of horrifying violence that reveals a completely different side of Laura—a cool woman who calmly faces down a murderer. It turns out that before Andrea's mother was Laura, she was someone completely different. For nearly 30 years, she's been hiding from the woman she once was, lying low in the hope that no one would ever find her. But now she's been exposed, and nothing will ever be the same again.