She Looks Happy: A Novel
It's the kind of thing only Emery would notice. Only the woman who loved Sloane Park for six years would notice. And on a Tuesday afternoon in March, when Sloane's engagement photograph comes up on her phone, the noticing is the first step in a four-month investigation Emery convinces herself is something other than what it is.
Emery is supposed to be fine. The breakup was fourteen months ago. She has a new girlfriend - a school counselor named Wren, gentle and direct in all the right ways. She has a career she is good at. She has a therapist who taught her to say I'm happy she is happy until she believes it.
Then the photograph.
The man Sloane is going to marry is a real estate principal with a clean public profile and a first wife in Pennsylvania who, Emery is sure, has a story to tell. The architectural firm Sloane works at has just pitched Emery's firm on a project. The wedding is in June. There is time, between now and then, to find out what Sloane does not know she needs to be saved from.
There is also time, between now and then, for Sloane to find out what Emery is.
SHE LOOKS HAPPY is a sapphic literary domestic thriller about obsession, recovery, and the architecture two women build around each other when one of them decides to leave and the other refuses to. Told in first-person present over the four months between the photograph and the wedding, it asks a hard question: is the woman who has been afraid of another woman for fourteen months the woman who has the most to fear - or the most to give?
For readers of Lisa Jewell, Allison Buccola, Sarah Waters, and the darker turns of Carissa Broadbent and Casey McQuiston.
Some sentences mean one thing the first time you say them. They mean the opposite by the time you mean them.
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