The Cost of Love
In the winter of 1823, a sixteen-year-old girl named Cecily Vale made a bargain. She was afraid of the only thing that had ever frightened her: loving someone who wouldn't....
In the winter of 1823, a sixteen-year-old girl named Cecily Vale made a bargain. She was afraid of the only thing that had ever frightened her: loving someone who wouldn't love her back with equal totality. So she asked for a guarantee. Total, mutual, inevitable love — any man who came close enough drawn in completely, no exceptions, no withholding. She got exactly what she asked for. She signed the contract. She never told anyone the terms. Two hundred years later, Nora Vale is thirty-two years old, lives in a precisely neutral Chicago apartment, and has spent her entire adult life making sure she is not the kind of person things happen to. She has been watching the women in her family bury the men they love since before she understood what she was watching. She knows the rules: don't attach, don't let them love you first, don't stay. She has followed them without fail. Then she walks into a coffee shop on a Tuesday and sits across from Marcus Ward. Love Like Drowning is the story of what happens when a two-hundred-year-old debt finally comes due — and the woman who inherits it discovers, for the first time in her family's history, that the contract has a gap in it. The bargain has been running for two hundred years. The clause Cecily missed was always there. Can Nora find it in time to save herself, Marcus, and her cousin who’s already in too deep?