Apples Never Fall

by Liane Moriarty

That was the secret of a happy marriage: step away from the rage.

you could still be lonely when you were married, that there had been times when she had woken up day after day crushed with loneliness, and still made breakfast for four children.

but her dreams didn’t have the same ferocious entitlement as Stan’s, because she was a woman, and women know that babies and husbands and sick parents can derail your dreams, at any moment they can drag you from your bed, they can forestall your career, they can lift you from your prized seat at Wimbledon from a match later described as “epic.”

She felt fond of Savannah, but she didn’t adore her in the fierce, complex way she loved her daughters, which meant, paradoxically, that she could spend three weeks with her no problem at all. Two tiny women in a tiny house.

Sometimes their children would do everything exactly as they’d taught them, and sometimes they would do all the things they’d told them not to do, and seeing them suffer the tiniest disappointments would be more painful than their own most significant losses, but then other times they would do something so extraordinary, so unexpected and beautiful, so entirely of their own choice and their own making, it was like a splash of icy water on a hot day.