Inspired by the real life romance between June Carter and Johnny Cash, A Woman in Pink is a thrilling story of obsessive love that spans decades, of the role of privilege, and the cost of addiction.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from A Woman In Pink by Megan Schikora, which releases on February 17th 2026.
In A Woman in Pink, an unnamed woman recounts her deeply intertwined relationship with Dutch, a man she meets in her twenties and immediately loves. Dutch tells her he has distanced himself from the substance-fueled chaos that once consumed him, while she explains she has left her eating disorder in the past. Together, they convince themselves they’ve outrun their darkest histories. But over the span of their fifteen-year relationship, those shadows loom large, influencing their bond in ways they never expected.
She wants to free herself from the turmoil of addiction. She also wants to believe that Dutch is her Johnny Cash, that she is his June Carter, and that theirs is a great love story. When their histories and choices finally collide, she is forced to confront everything she thought she knew about love, identity, and what it means to truly heal.
EXCERPT
At the bar, Dutch asked if I’d ever done any drugs.
“I’ve smoked weed a handful of times. I didn’t like it.” I smiled a little through my swig, adding, “I took to the drink just fine, though.”
I said it with no self-consciousness. I traveled in a twenty-something Irish Catholic pack that viewed alcohol consumption as a birthright, perfectly respectable and as commonplace in daily life as water. On Saturdays during football season, we arrived at Gaelic Park by noon to drink and watch the games, then hit the bar afterward, for a rough total of fourteen drinking hours.
I spent Sundays recovering with my best friends Claire and Fiona. We holed up in Claire’s living room in front of her TV, Claire curled on the loveseat, Fiona and I forming an L on the sectional, a bottle of Tylenol and bags of greasy takeout on the coffee table between us. Occasionally we sat up to take another handful or bite.
On our last ritual Sunday, I said feebly from my fetal position, “I want you to kill me. I mean it this time.”
Fiona shivered and drew a blanket over herself. “I feel bad, you guys.” Her hangovers always bloomed into guilt. “Maybe we should take it easy.”
Claire dipped her fingers into her glass of water and flicked droplets in Fiona’s direction. “I absolve you. Don’t feel bad.”
And we didn’t, not really, never for more than a day. We trusted that this period of harmless excess would pass, that down the road, our families and careers would occupy the foreground of our lives, that alcohol would drift naturally to the side.
Dutch seemed edgy. He told me he’d smoked a lot of weed. He told me he’d done coke a few times. He told me he’d gone through phases of taking pills.
“What kind of pills?”
“Xanax, Oxy, Vicodin.”
His list caught me off guard. He hurriedly explained that he didn’t take them anymore.
“And what”—I wasn’t sure what I wanted to ask— “what was that like?”
“You mean, what did it feel like?”
“Yeah.”
He toyed with a straw. “I guess pills made me not care. No matter what was happening around me, I just didn’t care.”
“And that was the point?” I stumbled. “That was how you wanted to feel?”
“I didn’t want to feel anything at all. That was the point.”
“The absence of feeling,” I mused. “That sounds like…death.”
He said, almost tenderly, “There’s nothing better.” Then he broke the brief silence that followed. “Like I said, I’m done with all that. Have been for a while.”
I nodded.
He fidgeted. “Are you judging me? I’m afraid you’re judging me.”
Watching him pick his way up this incline, checking over his shoulder to make sure I was still there, I said, “I’m not judging you. I promise.”
He told me that when he was twenty-one, he’d gotten a DUI. He’d gone to jail. He’d lost his license.
I said, “I know lots of people who’ve been through that. That was a long time ago. I’m glad you told me.”
He looked up. “This doesn’t change how you feel?”
His brokenness made me love him more. I was designed to run toward it.
This quality in me grated on Claire. If a drunk stray sidled up to us at a bar, her outright hostility and Fiona’s polite chilliness left no room for interpretation. But sometimes the interloper got a shot at me and discovered my willing ear.
After one highjacked outing, Claire grumbled, “What a fun girls’ night. Just you, me, Fiona, and Jeff the Kia salesman.”
“I’m sorry I let him talk so long, Claire,” I said. “Guy’s just going through a lot.”
“So? You don’t know him. You don’t owe him a therapy session.”
“Claire, his mom is sick. And his girlfriend broke up with him. What was I supposed to do?”
Fiona’s night had also been ruined, but she was gentler, said nothing. Claire told me flatly, “You’re a fly strip for fuckups.”
I believed, at my center, in the possibility of redemption.
I also believed, for the first time, that I was beautiful. Dutch made it so. “Look at my girlfriend,” he said to no one in particular at a crowded, noisy bar. I wore a pink dress that night, like June Carter’s in Walk the Line, when she and Johnny Cash first met, backstage. When Dutch looked at me like that, the way Johnny looked at June, every nerve inside me hummed.
And still, standing before him in my pink dress, in his warm, generative light, wanting to be nowhere else, I heard it again, a sound like a finger on a single piano key, a note of warning. Don’t get too comfortable.
Excerpted from A Woman in Pink by Megan Schikora © 2026 by Megan Schikora. Used with permission from Regal House Publishing.
