SEVEN

Naomi is forty-five and her life is good. Not good-with-an-asterisk. Good.She likes her husband more than she did at thirty. The kids are fine. The job is real - she runs operations for a company in New York, and she runs it well. For years she had one sentence that kept her exactly where she was: there is nobody to take the youngest on Mondays. Then her husband sold his company, came home, and took the youngest on Mondays. And the board asked her, for the third time, to be CEO.She doesn't have another sentence.That spring, at a conference she meant to leave early, she meets Dana - a woman her age who has been the one who decides in every room for fifteen years. Dana brings a friend. The friend brings another. By summer there are seven women meeting on Thursdays at a table in the back that only seats six: a founder, a CEO, a student, a mother, a woman who walked away from all of it. Each of them is living a life Naomi could have chosen. Each of them is certain she chose wrong. None of them is entirely wrong.Nobody dies in this book. Nobody is murdered. Something quieter and harder happens: a woman with nothing to complain about has to decide what she actually wants, out loud, in front of the people who would have wanted something else.SEVEN is a companion to EIGHT. Same question, a different life. Each book stands alone.