Clare Kendry, a beautiful light-skinned African American woman married to a white man who is unaware of her heritage, long ago cut all ties to her past, but a reunion with a childhood friend forces her to confront her lies.

From the author of The Object of My Affection comes a warm and witty family drama about love and lust, trust and betrayal, commitment and denial. Jane Cody keeps lists. After all, how else would she keep track of her life-her job producing a Boston TV show; her amiable but frankly dull second husband; and her precocious six-year-old son who "doesn't do small talk" but loves to bake. And as if that weren't enough she has an acid-tongued mother-in-law...

Inside a Benedictine monastery on Egret Island, off the South Carolina coast, is a beautiful and mysterious chair ornately carved with mermaids and dedicated to a saint who, legend claims, was a mermaid before her conversion. It is to Egret Island that Jessie Sullivan, a woman whose life has been constrained by circumstances, to care for her mother, who hasn't yet recovered from Jessie's father's death 33 years before. As Jessie contemplates the separation...