The Midlife Birthday Club

Three lifelong friends. Three fiftieth birthdays in the same season. One pact signed on a dusty rose napkin. Claire Morrison has been married to Greg for twenty-six years. She still puts dinner on the table at six. She still folds the laundry the way he likes it. She still hasn't been kissed on purpose in longer than she can remember. Somewhere along the way, the man who used to look at her across a room stopped looking at all. The third-grade teacher who used to paint, who used to laugh too loud, who used to want things - Claire isn't sure where that woman went, but she knows Greg hasn't noticed she's missing. Harper Ellis runs a financial division managing two hundred million dollars from a fourteenth-floor office in Charleston. Silk blouses. Architectural heels. A condo on East Bay Street with no kitchen table. She eats dinner standing at the sink because tables are for people who let other people stay. Years ago, there was a man named Jordan who built things with his hands and saw straight through her, and the day she realized she needed him was the day she walked away. She tells herself she made the right choice. She has been telling herself that for a very long time. Nina Vargas lives in a cottage on Edisto Island where her husband David's boots are still by the back door eighteen months after he died. The marsh view he fell in love with is the view she can no longer stand. Her teenage daughter is angry. Her mother-in-law is praying. And Nina is wide awake at three in the morning, every single morning, wondering if a person can grieve so hard they forget how to be alive. Then their fiftieth birthdays arrive, three weeks apart, and on the porch where these women have told each other the truth for thirty years, they sign a napkin. Three rules. Three signatures. One dusty rose pact: every month for the next year, they will do one thing that scares them. Something none of them has ever done. They will do it together. No backing out. Twelve months. Twelve adventures. Three women who walked onto that porch certain that fifty was where the story quietly ended, and find out - one terrifying, ridiculous, holy yes at a time - that fifty might be exactly where the real story begins. A funny, tender, sometimes-cry-into-your-coffee South Carolina Lowcountry novel about female friendship, midlife reinvention, the men who learn to look again, and the grace of choosing yourself in the second half of life.