Bessie's Fortune: A Novel

The novel opens on Thanksgiving, that most fraught of family holidays, where old wounds reopen over carved turkey and forced pleasantries. Mrs. Geraldine Jerrold sits at her table, haunted by the choices that brought her into the Jerrold family, and now watching her son Grey navigate the same treacherous currents of expectation and obligation that nearly drowned her. Her husband Burton's family carries secrets in their peculiar silences, particularly his father and sister Hannah, whose oddities Geraldine has spent years learning to distrust. As the holiday unfolds, the novel reveals a troubled family history that has shaped every interaction, every alliance, every betrayal. Bessie enters this charged atmosphere, and her fortune becomes the crucible in which the Jerrold and Grey families must finally confront what they have been running from. Holmes writes with sharp eye for the ways past decisions echo through generations, and her understanding of domestic tension remains precise and unsettling. This is a novel about what families owe each other, and the terrible cost of pretending the past is finished.