Suzanne Nelson was raised just outside of San Francisco. A Stanford grad and varsity runner, she heads to New York City for law school. She is gay, but has come out to no one. In New York she meets Kerry Neally, a New Yorker and fellow student. Who is straight. First in a study group and then as a pair, they find themselves become attached to one another. And have to work out that Kerry thinks she's straight. Eileen is Kerry's mother. She is a widow, and meeting Suzanne helps her leave the shell into which she placed herself after her husband died. And she comes to the attention of two men. One a widower. The other divorced. And love intevenes for her choice. With Suzanne settled into her New York life, she turns her back on her parents, who turned their backs on Suzanne's aunt Mary, a gay woman disowned by her parents and brother decades before. She, too, lives in New York and she and Eileen attempt to get Suzanne's parents to understand their daughter. Kate Nelson comes to New York to reason with her daughter. As eventually does William, her father. The story is about how the members of what becomes a large New York family deal with themselves, each other, and love.

The Neallys

And I thought of those words as I drifted off to sleep at my Aunt’s, words that I had not dared hoped to hear as I took the train up that morning.


Suze slept at her Aunt’s on Sunday and I met her at the Bronxville platform the next morning so we could go into the City together. We found two seats in the second car and just chatted until we got to Grand Central. We walked up a few blocks on Fifth and exchanged one last kiss for the day and she headed to Sullivan & Wilson, where she was paralegalling, and I headed a bit to the north to my Big Law firm, where I was Summer associating. At work, I was bursting to tell someone, but I decided to keep it as my secret.


Chapter 25