Imagine meeting the love of your life in the halls of the hospital that is caring for your husband after he suffers a stroke and is left in a coma.
Choice, hope, and wild love are at the heart of celebrated writer Jen Michalski’s debut queer romance, All This Can Be True (On sale: June 3, 2025; Keylight Books; ISBN: 9781684426096), a retelling of While You Were Sleeping, perfect for readers of Modern Lovers and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.
“I’m still numb,” Lacie said. “Even though I’ve had hours and hours to come to terms with it.”
“It’s shock,” Quinn said. At the coffee shop, they sat opposite of each other, two coffees, a piece of pie with two forks that neither of them had touched. “Your body is protecting you. It’s conserving your energy, meting out your despair so it doesn’t overwhelm you. I mean, you have to take care of yourself to be strong for him. When my daughter was in the hospital, I would practically live there for weeks at a time. And when she died, I was so sleep- and food-deprived I was hospitalized for a couple days myself.”
“Oh my God.” Lacie put her palm flat on the table. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea. How old was she?”
Quinn didn’t answer. Instead, she pulled a little photo album out of her purse and handed it to Lacie. “Here she is. I mean, before she was sick.”
There were eight 3×5 pictures, one of a baby girl with big green eyes holding a teething ring. She looked both amazed and horrified by the contraption, and Lacie laughed. The next was the girl on a swing, three or four, with Quinn behind her, their faces washed out by the sun. Quinn’s face had been slightly fuller then, more heart-moon-shaped, and Lacie wondered then if grief could literally consume you. There was a photo of the girl at the beach, standing in the surf, holding a knit octopus. Her hair was long, strawberry blonde, and freckles as small as pin pricks doted her cheeks and nose.
“She’s beautiful,” Lacie said simply. She handed the photo album back to Quinn. “My husband has the same color hair. What a darling. How¾”
“Did she die?” Quinn looked at the album, then Lacie. “It’s okay. Of course you’d want to know, and it’s awkward to ask. She had Batten disease. It’s a neurological disorder. Eventually you lose control of everything—your limbs, your bladder. Your speech. Your ability to eat. You’re confined to a bed and have a feeding tube while you slowly die. I lost her right after she turned nine, which was nineteen months, three days ago.”
“Oh, God. Quinn.” Lacie’s hand went to her chest. “I’m so sorry.”
Quinn nodded. Everyone said I’m sorry, Lacie realized, but what did it mean, really? How did it connect two people, unless they’d experienced the same loss?
“Was it just, uh, you and your daughter?” Lacie asked after a moment.
“Liv’s father wasn’t in the picture.” Quinn said.
For a moment, Lacie could have sworn she’d flinched again, her eyelid, shoulder, almost imperceptible. She stared past Lacie toward the counter, as if the past was stored there, complete with some highlight reel playing on the wall.
“So you said—” Lacie stammered. “You said you were visiting someone else here?”
“I’m on my way to British Columbia—to live in a co-op called Terabithia,” Quinn explained. “Also, my best friend has cancer, and I wanted to stop by and see her before I left the country permanently.”
“Wow, that’s heavy.” Lacie took a sip of coffee. Of course, everyone in the hospital was going through the same pain she was, but it didn’t make her feel any better.
“I know it sounds very hippy-dippy.” Quinn nodded, forking a small piece of pie. “Terabithia, I mean. Jim and Lara Hoffs, the owners, they lost their daughter to cancer awhile back, and they felt like everything had changed in them but not in the world, you know?”
“The club of the grieving.” Lacie nodded.
“Yeah, kind of, although not exactly.” Quinn did not look at her. Her mind seemed to be in another place, some clouded shadow place, her eyes anchored in the intermediate distance of thought. Lacie wondered if Derek died, whether she’d live in that clouded shadow place, too, whether it would slip over her without warning, like the marine layer up at Carlsbad State Park, the sheet of fog that pressed against the hills and ocean in the mornings and evenings before the sun burned through.
“It’s more like—” Quinn blinked, back in the world with her again. Her eyes met Lacie’s. “Just a place to go to escape everything. The town was essentially abandoned years ago, and you can only get there by ferry. You have to have a trade, or something of value, to offer the community in return for admittance, although I think they’d let anyone in if you really wanted it badly enough.”
“So would you work, or…?”
“I’m a massage therapist. Jim and Lara said I could provide it as a trade for other services. Some of the other residents want to do away with currency entirely.”
“Will you have cell phone service and Internet?”
“Yeah, not great, but some.” Quinn shrugged. “But the whole idea is to be free of one’s old life and trappings, you know?”
“Hmm,” Lacie murmured. Could she be free of her trappings? Although they didn’t need it all—the 5,000-square feet of house, the Renoir, the infinity pool—she had gotten used to what they had. But when she traveled with Derek, and he was away at a meeting, she liked to pretend she lived in the hotel room, that it was her apartment. She loved the coziness of it. She loved being accountable to no one. She loved being alone.
“What do you do?” Quinn asked. As quickly as she said it, she shook her head and laughed. “You know, that’s such an East Coast thing to say—I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I don’t do anything,” Lacie said. “Now that the girls are grown, I was thinking about getting my master’s in architecture or landscape design.”
“Oh, so designing buildings and stuff?” Quinn’s face clouded in confusion.
“Probably not.” She smiled. “More like I’d be responsible for designing the architectural features outside people’s homes—the waterfall features, the flagstones and infinity pools.”
“Still, I’ve never known anyone who’s an architect.” Quinn nodded in awe. “All my friends were artists and musicians, poets. Hell, I was in a band for years before I got pregnant with Liv. The massage therapy stuff was only because I had to get a real job.”
“What kind of band?” Lacie asked, although she thought she could guess: some sort of Grateful Dead cover or other jam band.
“Ever heard of The Clit Girls?” Quinn raised an eyebrow and grinned.
Excerpted from All This Can Be True by Jen Michalski, Copyright © 2025 by Jen Michalski. Turner/Keylight.
