Sublime

‘Binding and doctoring always used to go together. Easing the pain, easing people into life and out of it.’

She’d never strayed far from this enormous manor house, tucked into the quiet Essex countryside two days’ walk northeast of London, where rolling green hills turned to wheat as autumn crept across the land.

populate

Maggie Jones

The chasm between the girl Mama had been raised to be and the woman she had become seemed impossible to cross.

But Alice had been an idiot. She’d always known her mother was hiding something; that was why she’d gone through Julia’s drawers while she was in middle school. She’d thought the secret was Julia’s, though, and had nothing to do with her.

like her child in a playpen in a distant part of the house, occupying her heart but not threatening to interrupt her dinner party,