Chapter 27

Chicago, Illinois

June 2012

When we moved to Chicago, I decided it was time to see if I could seriously make a career of writing. I was so fortunate to be doing some part-time consulting work for the clean-energy company my father and some of his partners had started, and that work combined with Dave’s modest salary as a resident was enough for us to live on. But flying back and forth between Chicago and New York was not sustainable for us, not if I wanted to really be a writer.

After years of flirting with the idea, after years of pursuing fiction in my off hours, I told myself I had six months to get a manuscript finished and into pitchable shape. I loved writing. It was all I wanted to do. But could I find a way to make it a career? Could I be a writer and actually have that support our life? I did not know.

I had spent the past four years sending my work to a literary agent, the fabulous Lacy Lynch at Dupree Miller & Associates, who had always been receptive and encouraging and supportive, but, just the month prior, her response to my entreaties had gone from “You’re not ready for me yet, show me your next draft,” to something to the effect of “All right, you are almost ready, let’s do this.”

We made our working relationship official in May 2012. We went from “dating to engaged,” we joked, the month before Dave and I moved. I knew that Lacy could get my work onto the desks of interested editors—once my work was ready for that. I gave myself half a year to focus primarily on writing and pitching. If nothing came of it in that time, I would get a job selling yoga clothes or serving coffee and continue to pursue fiction on the side.

That summer I raced to finish up my manuscript of The Traitor’s Wife, the historical novel I was working on about Peggy Shippen Arnold, the wife of Benedict Arnold and a significant character in his notorious treason during the American Revolution.

Dave was going through a rough adjustment to residency. He was feeling unsure of his skills as a surgeon and having a hard time getting comfortable in the hospital environment after so many years as a student. Plus, we were all on edge about Louisa, who was going through intense treatment for her multiple myeloma. That summer my mother-in-law underwent a stem cell transplant that took her to death’s door. The procedure was horrific and the recovery was long and excruciating. There was a period of forced isolation when Louisa’s body was too weak to be exposed to the germs of others.

After that treatment, slowly and steadily, under the loving and diligent care of her husband and loved ones and her outstanding medical team at the University of Chicago, Louisa grew stronger and began to feel better. Her hair began to grow back. She could eat and began to rebuild her muscles. A former triathlete, Louisa was not quite fully back to herself, but she was once again able to take long walks, so we enjoyed walking Penny together, talking about books and life and her excitement that she was going to become a grandmother for the first time as the air turned crisp and the colors of autumn began to touch the leaves.

By the fall, Dave and I were settling into some sort of rhythm in Chicago, but I was getting close to my self-imposed deadline to either jump into this writer thing full-time or make a responsible back-up plan to ensure that Dave and I would be financially stable during the years of his medical training.

I’ll always remember the date: November 17, 2012. It was my mother’s birthday, and I was flying out east for the Yale–Harvard football game, to be played that year at Harvard. Dave could not get off of work, so I was going to meet Marya and go with friends. When I landed in Boston, I turned my cellphone on. Immediately, it began to chirp at me.

I had a text message from Lacy, my literary agent: “Can you talk?”

A subsequent message repeated the same question, but with additional question marks. “Can you talk???” I also had a voicemail from Lacy. I listened to it.

Marya stood by the curb, waiting for me outside the airport. When I saw her, I was still listening to Lacy’s voicemail, so I smiled at her, gestured that it would only be a minute more. I listened to the end of the message and hung up the phone.

I turned to Marya with a smile. How perfect that it was Marya—my former roommate and the first friend who had ever read my fiction, the first person to tell me that I could do it. “Mar, I sold my book,” I said, incredulous. “Simon & Schuster is going to publish The Traitor’s Wife.”