Fourteen Months: A Novel

She has managed four hundred deaths in this county. She was not permitted to manage his.

Delia Machen is the hospice nurse for Mathews County, Virginia - eight thousand people, no hospital, one rescue squad, and a woman who has sat at four hundred kitchen tables and told four hundred families exactly what is about to happen.

At twenty to two on a February morning she finds her husband on the bathroom floor, shaking with a fever she recognizes before she is fully awake. By seven she is standing in a corridor in Richmond, seventy miles from home, opposite a woman she has never seen - who is holding a photograph of a document Delia has never read, with Roy's signature on it, dated fourteen months ago.

There is no affair. That is the first thing everyone will assume and the first thing Delia rules out. What her husband did instead is harder to look at, and it has been going on since the December before last, and he was five days from getting away with it.

Fourteen Months is a novel about competence - about a woman so reliable that the people who loved her stopped bringing her anything difficult, and never once told her that was what they were doing.

The second novel in the Tidewater Reckoning series. Each book stands entirely alone.