A Good Decision?

A single decision can echo across a lifetime—and beyond.

As a young woman, Joan makes a choice she believes she can live with: she gives up her baby son, John, for adoption and never speaks of him again. Forty years later, he reappears without warning. His life has been shaped by rejection, poverty, and anger, and when Joan turns him away once more, the consequences are fatal.

After Joan’s sudden death, her daughter Sophie begins to uncover the truth her mother buried. Tracking down the brother she never knew existed, Sophie forms an unexpected bond with John, offering him kindness, money, and a chance to rebuild his life. But when John finally confesses what he has done, Sophie is forced into an impossible choice—one that will change her life forever.

Dark, unsettling, and deeply human, this novel explores how secrets are inherited, how guilt mutates over time, and how the past can reach forward with devastating force. It is a story about responsibility, forgiveness, and the terrible price of decisions that refuse to stay buried.
(Previously published as ‘Secrets and Lives’, this is a substantially extended edition.)