DEAR SISTER

Three years ago, Denise stopped speaking to her sister. Neither of them remembers the argument exactly the same way. Now their mother is dead, the family house needs to be emptied, and the sisters are standing in the kitchen together for the first time in years. At first, Denise thinks the hardest part will be being around Jo.

Then they find the letters.

Hidden in a battered shoebox in their mother's closet are pages their mother wrote but never sent. Letters that reach back into the final years of her marriage, the secrets surrounding their father, and the painful events that ultimately drove her daughters apart.

As Denise and Jo read them, one piece at a time, the story they have each carried for three years begins to change. Denise discovers that her mother deliberately allowed Jo to believe something that wasn't true. Jo discovers that the betrayal she thought came from her sister was far more complicated than she ever imagined.

And both sisters are forced to confront a harder truth: Their mother wasn't trying to hurt them. She was trying to protect them. She just made the kind of choice that can protect a family from the truth while quietly destroying the family itself.

As the house is emptied room by room, Denise and Jo begin sorting through more than their mother's belongings. They are sorting through old memories, old loyalties, old resentments and the years they lost believing they knew what happened.