1FloraFlora found the note when she got home from school:
Girls, I am headed off to my Santorini collage workshop!!! Love you both so, so much and I will be home on Sunday by lunchtime. You can order pizza and get what you need with my credit card but be cheap!Love, love, love, love, Mom.Their apartment in Athens, Greece, felt empty—emptier than usual. Flora wished she could bike over to her Grammy Charlotte’s house the way she’d done when they lived in the same gated community in Savannah, Georgia. Grammy kept a pantry of snacks for Flora and her sister: Nutter Butters, Mallomars, off-brand Chex mix, nuts. Flora would sit on a tall stool at Grammy’s kitchen counter and talk about whatever and Grammy would listen.
Something’s wrong with my mom, Flora could say.
Or Flora and her grandmother could take Grammy Charlotte’s golf cart to the Palmetto Club. Flora knew her grandmother’s member number—P1107—and Flora could order ice cream or a basket of curly fries. They could sit on lounge chairs by the pool and Flora could tell Grammy Charlotte she had a very bad feeling.
A mint chocolate chip cone. The smell of chlorine, sunscreen, and fries. Grammy Charlotte in some bright-colored visor, turning to Flora when Flora said,
Grammy?What is it, honey?Grammy Charlotte, Flora could say,
Mom’s in trouble. Please help us. We’re all alone, and I’m scared.2LeeLee Perkins adjusted her oversized Gucci sunglasses and raised her drink for another sip, but there was nothing in her cup. Oh, she remembered the days when the gentleman who served Perrier-Jouët to the Beverly Hills Hotel pool cabanas would fill her champagne flute without Lee even noticing it was drained!
“Do you want another chardonnay, dear?”
Reluctantly, Lee lowered her gaze to her mother, Charlotte, who sat next to her at the Palmetto Club, a community pool located just a quick golf cart ride from Charlotte’s house. Charlotte wore a zebra-striped bathing suit; a matching, zebra-striped visor; and Candy Yum Yum–colored lipstick she’d “borrowed” from her daughter and never returned.
“Yes,” said Lee.
“Hurry up, then, and get me one too,” said Charlotte. “Drinks are half-price ’til six! Wine Down Wednesday, you know.”
Lee rose from a luxuriant slouch, wincing at the Savannah sunlight cutting through her faded umbrella. She was not surrounded by movie producers, A-list stars, and Hollywood influencers. No: Lee was forty-three years old, formerly famous, and living in her mother’s guest room, sleeping underneath a hideous painting of bulldogs on a sailboat.
Her napkin read: Truth Versus Chardonnay.
Lee and her mother chose chardonnay. Every time.
After a few, Lee could pretend she was back in golden California. She could return to the time when her bank accounts were flush and her family wasn’t scattered across the world, each one rapidly disappearing into their own private catastrophes.
As Lee strolled toward the snack bar, retirees pretended not to stare at Charlotte Perkins’s “troubled” daughter, the reality TV star and mental patient about whom they said, not so sotto voce,
Lee Perkins is a complete disaster but wow, isn’t she gorgeous?Lee felt as if she were disappearing, her career stalled and her manic depression muffled—but not eradicated—by medications that narrowed her range of emotions and made her hands shake.
Honestly, thought Lee, everyone in her family seemed to be adrift. Charlotte rarely drove her car outside Palmetto Shores, her gated community. Lee’s brother, Cord, was drowning in booze and work. Regan, Lee’s baby sister, had moved all the way to Greece where she lived with her teenaged daughters, Isabelle and Flora, on the glittering Mediterranean Sea. Lee had once underlined sentences in a novel that described her family:
When you are small, if you reach out, and nobody takes your hand, you stop reaching out, and reach inside, instead. That’s just the way it was.Lee and her siblings had been raised in the late 1980s, a time of big hair and enough Aqua Net to hold it in place. A time (especially in the American South) of preppy vibes and straight teeth; cold smiles that betrayed nothing, L.L.Bean totes, and living by the credo—later cemented in the movie
The Wolf of Wall Street—“Act as if!”
What happened to adults who knew only how to
act as if they were a family? Over the next few weeks, in New York and Savannah and Athens, Greece, the furiously flailing Perkins family would sink, one by one. And in their last breaths, could they, could Lee—lovely, sad Lee—see that what would save them was quiet, unsexy, and hidden in plain sight? A simple truth, yet hard to understand: If you didn’t reach out, you would never know you weren’t alone in the water.
3FloraOn their second night alone, Flora and her sister, Isabelle, made noodles with butter for dinner—the weird, square χυλοπίτες noodles, the butter tangier than American Land O’Lakes. “I know you think I’m paranoid,” said Flora, wiping her lips with a paper napkin, “but I just have a bad feeling about Mom and this craft workshop. When I checked her location, I couldn’t find her on my list. She disabled Find My!”
“You’re tracking Mom, now?” Isabelle raised an eyebrow. She had twisted her long hair into a topknot and wore very expensive sweatpants, a shirt with an illustration of a vintage red Ford Bronco and the swirled letters American Classic, and Nike Air Force 1s. She was a stunning and volatile eighteen-year-old, unpredictable and sometimes mean, but Flora adored her and clung to her in a way Flora knew made her sister angry.
“And I sent her a text and it didn’t show delivered or read, Isabelle. Something’s wrong.”
“I’m sure it’s fine,” said Isabelle, scrolling. “Just let her have her weirdo artist retreat, Jesus.”
“I think we should call Grammy Charlotte.”
“Oh my God, I miss Palmetto Shores! I miss the club and the golf cart and even the creepy dog painting in Grammy’s guest room.”
Copyright © 2026 by Amanda Eyre Ward. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
