After Sarah Jane

Three years after the death of their three-year-old daughter, Sophia and Beau LeBlanc are still together, still living in the same New Orleans home, and still surrounded by reminders of the little girl whose absence changed everything. They have learned how to move through anniversaries, family gatherings, quiet rooms, and all the ordinary days that somehow continued after Sarah Jane was gone. Their marriage is not what it once was, but Sophia has always believed that whatever grief took from them, she and Beau endured it together.

Then Sophia turns on Sarah Jane’s old iPad, looking for photographs and videos of the daughter she misses. Instead, she finds a message meant for Beau from another woman: I know we agreed to stop. I miss you. In an instant, the fragile certainty Sophia has built around her marriage begins to crack, and she is left wondering how much of the life she thought she understood may have existed beyond her view.

Searching for the truth forces Sophia to confront questions she has avoided for years—not only about Beau, but about grief, blame, loyalty, and the ways two people can love each other while becoming strangers beneath the same roof. The answers are not as simple as betrayal or forgiveness, and neither is deciding what comes afterward.

Set in New Orleans, After Sarah Jane is contemporary women’s fiction about marriage after unimaginable loss, the complicated choices people make while grieving, and what it means to discover that surviving something together does not guarantee you survived it in the same way.