Opening
A decade vanishes, and the past returns with a shock. As Alice Love wakes in a 2008 hospital believing it’s 1998, her sister Elisabeth arrives, bringing tenderness, envy, and the truth Alice can’t remember. These chapters unravel a family’s hidden fractures—an angry husband, three unfamiliar children, a remade mother, and an enigmatic absence named Gina Boyle.
What Happens
Chapter 6: A Sister’s Arrival
The chapter splits between Elisabeth’s therapy “homework” and Alice’s perspective. Elisabeth gets a call from her husband, Ben, who’s shepherding Alice’s three children through dinner and bedtime—an image that pierces her with a fleeting, shameful envy. She rings Alice’s mobile and hears a young, broken version of her sister sobbing. Alice thinks it’s 1998. For the first time in years, Elisabeth feels needed, like the protective older sister she used to be. As she drives to the hospital, the place she and Ben “haunt,” she’s swallowed by memories of waiting rooms and the ache of Infertility and the Longing for Family.
Elisabeth finds Alice pale and quiet—nothing like the “fingernail-tapping busy, busy, busy” woman she’s become. Alice looks at her with the gaze of an old, lost self. Her first words slice straight through Elisabeth’s defenses: “Oh Libby, what happened to you?” From Alice’s viewpoint, relief crashes into alarm. Elisabeth looks older, heavier, wary-eyed. Alice shows her a photo of three children—Are they really hers? Are they “nice”? The talk is halting and formal, as if a decade dug a canyon between them. In her journal, Elisabeth registers the most staggering gap in Alice’s memory: she has forgotten everything. “Even Gina.”
Chapter 7: The Divorce
Alice and Elisabeth try to assemble the missing ten years. Alice remembers swimming with a woman whose toenails match hers in multicolored polish, and a voice saying, “I’m sorry, but there is no heartbeat.” Elisabeth stiffens and denies knowing. In her journal, she tells the truth: the “no heartbeat” is her own memory from a fertility appointment. She lies to Alice anyway, proof of the bitterness and silence that have grown between them.
Revelations pile up. Elisabeth is married to Ben—whom Alice only recalls as a gentle “giant grizzly bear” who designs neon signs—and Alice was the matron of honor, a role now wiped clean. Elisabeth describes the 2008 Alice as breathless and “busy,” with snobbish edges that once dismissed Elisabeth’s job as “tacky.” Then Alice finally gets Nick on the phone. The man who answers is cold, profane, and furious, accusing her of playing “fucking games.” The stranger on the line cannot be the husband she remembers. Afterward, Elisabeth says it plainly: Alice and Nick Love are getting a divorce.
Chapter 8: “We Did Meet”
A flashback drops Alice onto her wedding night in 1998: champagne, lacquered hair, giddy laughter, a perfect cake. Alice tears up imagining the world where they never met. Nick answers her panic with a promise: “We did meet.” The memory glows like a talisman—proof of a happiness Alice refuses to believe could die.
Back in her hospital bed, Alice insists it’s all a mistake. Nick fears divorce—his “phobia,” after his parents’ split—so they must have only fought. Elisabeth counters with facts: Nick moved out six months ago; Alice herself declared the marriage “dead and buried.” Alice can’t reconcile that with the woman she feels like now. Old insecurities roar to life—her “nothing sort of person” personality, her “piglike face.” When Elisabeth strokes her forehead, Alice flashes to childhood, to the day Elisabeth braced her for their father’s death. “You’re a good big sister,” she says. Elisabeth rejects it, but the moment hums with their old closeness. Then a flamboyant woman in sequins and tulips appears at the foot of the bed.
Chapter 9: Salsa Dancing and Another Wedding
The visitor is Alice’s mother, Barb—transformed. The shy widow Alice remembers has become a glamorous salsa dancer with mahogany hair and theatrical makeup. Barb explains she was doing a school salsa demo with “Roger” when she got the call. Another shock follows: Barb is married to Roger, Nick’s father.
Alice reels. Roger was pompous and self-satisfied. How did her mother marry him—and why can’t she remember it? Barb treats the “divorce” as settled fact. Bolstered by the 1998 love blazing in her chest, Alice announces the divorce is off. Barb cheers—amnesia as a “blessing in disguise.” Elisabeth pulls them back to earth: their old colleague Jane Turner is currently Alice’s divorce lawyer, and Alice and Nick are fighting a serious custody battle. Alice waves it away. She’ll fix her marriage. Elisabeth’s parting line is surgical: Alice may have forgotten ten years, but Nick hasn’t.
Chapter 10: Dreams and Revelations
The night drags, broken by hourly neuro checks and dreams that feel like scrambled pages from a lost book. In one, Nick dismisses her with cutting contempt. In another, he mutters, “It’s always about Gina, isn’t it? Gina, Gina, Gina.” The “no heartbeat” memory resurfaces, as does the image of Alice straining to push a giant rolling pin uphill—fame, pressure, public judgment distilled into a single, impossible task. Awake, she flinches at a simple kindness she forgot to ask: does Elisabeth have children?
At 3:30 a.m., Elisabeth writes. Rage simmers—chronic, low, exhausting—born from infertility and years of envying Alice’s “perfect little life.” That jealousy walled them off from truth; she never knew Alice’s marriage was collapsing. She records the visit to Alice’s house with Ben and Barb: Olivia’s dramatic flares, Madison Love’s teenage contempt, Tom’s fearful silence. She mourns a bright snapshot—Alice’s 30th birthday, when Alice and Nick were a team—and grieves who they’ve become. Alice sinks back into sleep, the fragments circling: Gina’s name, the words “no heartbeat,” and a hill that never ends.
Character Development
A decade’s gap forces everyone to face who they were and who they’ve become.
- Alice Love
- Regresses to her 29-year-old self—romantic, soft, and hopeful—and feels betrayed by the hardened, “busy” woman she supposedly became.
- Fixates on restoring her marriage, clinging to the wedding-night certainty: “We did meet.”
- Battles resurfacing insecurities about worth, appearance, and likability.
- Elisabeth
- Confessional journal entries expose grief, jealousy, and a brittle façade strengthened by years of failed treatments.
- Protective instincts reignite as she shepherds Alice through the wreckage—while her own secrets (the “no heartbeat”) sharpen their distance.
- Nick Love
- Exists in two clashing portraits: the adoring newlywed of memory and the enraged stranger on the phone.
- His refusal to indulge Alice’s amnesia suggests deep wounds that memory cannot erase.
- Barb Jones
- Reinvents herself as a dazzling salsa dancer and Roger’s wife, embodying late-life reinvention and the unpredictable reshuffling of family bonds.
Themes & Symbols
- Memory and identity
- The story interrogates Memory and Identity by splitting Alice into two selves: the loving wife she remembers and the efficient stranger everyone else recognizes. Elisabeth’s guarded recollections add a counterweight—memory as burden, not balm.
- Love’s evolution
- Through wedding-night bliss and divorce-day venom, the book tracks The Evolution of Love and Marriage—how intimacy calcifies into routine, resentment, or reinvention. Barb and Roger’s union reframes “forever” as flexible.
- Transformation
- Nearly everyone changes over the lost decade, dramatizing Transformation of the Self: Alice becomes “busy,” Elisabeth toughens, Barb blooms. The chapters ask whether change is growth, armor, or both.
- Infertility’s quiet violence
- Elisabeth’s private losses and the “no heartbeat” memory reveal how Infertility and the Longing for Family shape relationships—silencing conversations, feeding envy, and warping self-worth.
Symbol: The Hospital
- A threshold between lives. For Alice, it’s a bewildering rebirth into a future she doesn’t recognize. For Elisabeth, it’s haunted by appointments and absence—a place where hope and grief sit side by side.
Key Quotes
“Oh Libby, what happened to you?”
Alice’s first words to Elisabeth invert expectation: the patient diagnoses the visitor. The line exposes Elisabeth’s invisible suffering and reorients the chapter around her pain as much as Alice’s amnesia.
“We did meet.”
Nick’s wedding-night assurance becomes Alice’s lodestar. It encapsulates her faith that love, once real, can be recovered—fueling her refusal to accept the divorce.
“I’m sorry, but there is no heartbeat.”
Heard in Alice’s mind but owned by Elisabeth, the line embodies misaligned memories and the secrecy between sisters. It’s a wound that explains Elisabeth’s restrained cruelty and aching protectiveness.
“Are you playing fucking games?”
The phone call shatters Alice’s nostalgia. The profanity signals not just anger, but alienation—evidence that trust and patience have eroded beyond easy repair.
“Dead and buried.”
Elisabeth’s reminder that Alice herself used this phrase forces a reckoning: the 2008 Alice made choices the 1998 Alice can’t imagine. Identity isn’t just memory; it’s accumulated decisions.
“It’s always about Gina, isn’t it? Gina, Gina, Gina.”
The dream plants Gina at the center of the marital breakdown and foreshadows the role of outside loyalties—real or perceived—in unraveling love.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
Chapters 6–10 ignite the novel’s engine: a cascade of revelations that confront Alice with who she became and what she stands to lose. By braiding Alice’s present-tense confusion with Elisabeth’s intimate journal, the narrative creates potent dramatic irony—readers grasp truths Alice can’t, heightening tension around the divorce, the children, and Gina. The wedding-night flashback anchors the stakes, turning reconciliation into a quest not just for love, but for coherence: how did that couple become these strangers? These sections widen the story from a single accident to a family saga—about sisterhood, secrecy, reinvention, and the fragile stories we tell to live.