A writer's suicide sends ripples through the world she left behind: "A wonderful book...moving and tender and tough and unsentimental, all at the same time."--Chicago Tribune An accomplished author with a string of devoted lovers, Anna Hand savors life in all of its bittersweet, fleeting moments. So when she gets a letter and discovers her brother has a daughter he never knew about, she sees a major part of life that has passed her by: a child to love. Desperate to unite this young girl with her father, Anna moves back to Charlotte, North Carolina, to rediscover her family and convince him to accept her. Caught between the politics of her upper-crust family and love for a married man, Anna finds her health in serious danger. When her bad days catch up with her good ones, she must finally face the disease that had been hiding just beneath the surface. Not willing to resign herself to months of aggressive treatment, and knowing the outcome will be the same regardless, she takes matters into her own hands, and surrenders her body to the sea. But it isn't only Anna's death that shocks her family. The papers she left behind may lead her sister Helen to discover more about Anna than she, or any of the Hand family, need to know...   "Gilchrist excels in drawing the bonds of love and resentment in sexual and family relationships, and no one who encounters her characters here or in her earlier works will want to miss reading about them again." --Publishers Weekly