From August to August

One year. Two Augusts. A new life.
At forty, Gail thought she knew the shape of her life.
She had a partner of nearly a decade, a home, a shared history, and the kind of love that feels like family. Until, in a hotel room in Thailand, one seemingly simple question opened a crack she could no longer close.
Three months later, her mother fell ill.
And suddenly, nothing else mattered.
From August to August is the story of a year in which a life came almost completely undone: a mother who died too soon, a love that had to transform in order to survive, a home that stopped being home, and a woman forced to discover who she was when so many of the certainties she had built her life upon disappeared.
But this is not only a story about losing.
It is a story about choosing again.
About grief and desire. About friends who become family. About disastrous dates, bodies waking back up, new homes, animals, travel, sex, humor, fear, and the strange freedom that appears when a woman stops waiting for someone else to give her permission to live.
One August begins beneath the rain in Thailand, beside the man who had always known how to take her to happiness.
The next ends in Cartagena.
This time, she got herself there.
Between those two Augusts, she had to lose one life to discover that she could still build another