The Last Rose of Summer

At a summer gathering in Carthage, Deborah Larrabee faces the life she never quite lived. Past youth's threshold, she watches her old friends Josie and Birdaline now wives and mothers, their former beauty settled into something more respectable. Deborah has existed in their shadow: overlooked, unchosen, invisible. Not because she lacks worth, but because the world measures women by a different ruler entirely. When Newt Meldrum sees her clearly, really sees her, it threatens to undo everything she's accepted as truth. This is a novel about how we internalize the world's harshest judgments, and whether letting them go is the bravest act of all. Quiet, precise, and devastating in its gentleness.