In the sweet\u2014and sometimes challenging\u2014blur of her first nine months of motherhood, bookworm Cam has found domestic joy with her daughter, Polly, and her husband, Luke, as well as enough downtime to do some pleasure reading, so she\u2019s nervous about returning to her job at a London literary agency. Her first day back certainly doesn\u2019t turn out as she imagines: Unable to find Luke, she drops Polly off at day care and goes to work. When Luke doesn\u2019t answer her texts for hours, she starts to worry. Then, on a television in her office, she sees live footage of an ongoing siege at a nearby warehouse\u2014and realizes her husband seems to have taken three people hostage. Several hours later, despite the intervention of Niall Thompson, a trained police hostage negotiator, two of those three people will be dead, and Luke will be in the wind. Seven years pass, and while both Cam and Niall seem to have moved on in various ways, they\u2019re both tethered to the memories and pain of that June afternoon. Niall\u2019s wife left him that same day, and ever since he\u2019s been troubled with dreams of the gunshots that destroyed not only the lives of the hostages, but also his career. Cam finds joy in Polly\u2019s growth, but she can\u2019t let go of her love for her husband\u2014and her deep-rooted belief that he must still be out there, and may have an explanation for everything. Cam\u2019s fierce love for Luke is admirable, but it also feels somewhat na\u00efve, even as she and Niall begin to uncover discrepancies and coincidences about that day and the weeks leading up to it, many of which seem like quite a narrative stretch. The sweet mundanity of Cam and Luke\u2019s \u201cbefore\u201d relationship is the true treasure of the book, as is the tension of the early chapters. McAllister asks us to consider whether blind faith in those we love is always justified\u2014and worth the cost.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the sweet\u2014and sometimes challenging\u2014blur of her first nine months of motherhood, bookworm Cam has found domestic joy with her daughter, Polly, and her husband, Luke, as well as enough downtime to do some pleasure reading, so she\u2019s nervous about returning to her job at a London literary agency. Her first day back certainly doesn\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2140,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2139"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2139\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}