Forgiveness

Some loves survive everything—except the truth. On New Year’s Eve 2020, as political unrest erupts in Washington, D.C., seventy-year-old Fiona Goldberg confronts a reckoning far closer to home. When her husband, Reuben—a journalist covering the January 6 Insurrection—is injured, Fiona is left alone with the past she has spent decades trying to quiet. The memories return in fragments: the Vietnam War protests that first bound them together, a fatal accident that shaped her youth, an affair that nearly destroyed their marriage, and a secret she has carried in silence for nearly half a century. As Fiona revisits the choices that defined her life—love, betrayal, ambition, motherhood denied—she begins to question the stories we tell ourselves about loyalty, aging, and redemption. Against a backdrop of American political upheaval, Forgiveness explores the intimate terrain of a long marriage and the fragile architecture of memory. A continuation of the story begun in What a Trip, this literary novel examines what it means to grow older with someone who knows your deepest failures—and whether true forgiveness is ever complete. For readers of thoughtful, character-driven literary women’s fiction, Forgiveness is a meditation on regret, resilience, and the courage to confront the truths that shape us.