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

“Let her go,” said Debbie Pugh O’Neil, Kate’s sister, again. She was the hard-liner among them.


“That is easy for you to say,” William told her. “It is not your family that we’re talking about.”


“Of course it’s my family. But I will not allow…this to destroy us. She made her choice and that’s—”


“What about Suzanne? Are you saying that it was her choice too?”


“It was not her choice to be what she is. It is her choice to refrain from sinning. It is God’s test.”


“And she has failed His test,” he said. “And we are to just abandon her. What about Kate? She is no sinner. She is doing what we are supposed to be doing. Tending to her daughter. What I am supposed to be doing.”


“And now she is a bigamist,” Kate’s mother said about her daughter.


“Please, mother. We are not going through this again,” Debbie said. “All we can do is pray for them and be welcoming to them when they come back.”


Chapter 100