Long Sleeves in August

Marilyn Aldrich has everything: a devoted husband, a gracious farm estate in central Ohio, and a reputation she has spent twenty years carefully building. What she has spent those same twenty years hiding is a faint row of letters scratched into the inside of her left forearm?five marks made by a sixteen-year-old girl with a staple and a Sunday night and a boy she was certain she would love forever.

When a formal luncheon at the country club goes suddenly wrong?a waiter, a tipped glass of iced tea, and a moment of wet silk?the name Marilyn has kept hidden beneath long sleeves and careful silence is visible for the first time in decades. The Hendricks Foundation board seat she has worked toward and quietly dreamed about now hangs by a thread.

But the woman who drives home in silence that afternoon is not the same woman who drove out. In the long hours before dawn, she makes a decision: not to withdraw gracefully, not to manage the situation one more time, but to walk into the office of the formidable Helen Prescott and finally, after thirty-five years, push up her sleeve.

Long Sleeves in August is a quiet, powerful novella about what we carry from the people we were, and what it costs?and frees us?to stop pretending otherwise.