In this riveting story of family bonds and buried truths, a young woman’s homecoming becomes a reckoning as four days together threaten to shatter the comfortable lies that have held her family together.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Marshall Fine’s Hemlock Lane, which releases on November 25th 2025.
In the summer of 1967, the Levitsky family convenes for a long weekend at their home in the suburbs―an idyllic holiday for the perfect family.
But Nora has always known better.
Growing up, she learned to tiptoe around her mother Lillian’s explosive temper. Her father did the same. Nora’s sole confidante was their housekeeper, Clara, and their bond has only strengthened through the years. In fact, it’s all that’s keeping Nora together for her homecoming. But under that lifetime of pressure, the facade is beginning to splinter.
Over the next four days, everyone’s secrets are at risk. None more so than what Nora really wants for her life, how Clara has helped her get it…and how they’ve orchestrated it all behind Lillian’s back.
As the family grapples with the complex ties that bind them, Nora discovers that facing the truth―however painful―might be the key to finally breaking free. This weekend, Nora’s bravest act may be in knowing which bonds to cherish and which ones need to be gently set aside, making room for a future of her own choosing.
Nora Levitsky pulled off New York State Highway 17 into the parking lot of a diner in Roscoe, New York. From here it was only about one hundred miles south to the Tappan Zee Bridge in Tarrytown, less than two hours to her parents’ house in the hills north of its eastern end.
No point in arriving any earlier than necessary, she thought. I’d like to be able to breathe easy for a while longer.
Plus, it was lunchtime, and she’d skipped breakfast to get an early start from Syracuse.
She parked her 1959 Ford Country Squire station wagon, formerly her father’s work car, in the diner’s half-full parking lot and went inside, where the hostess seated her in a booth. When the elderly waitress shuffled over with a menu, Nora said, “That’s OK—can I just have a grilled cheese sandwich and a large Coke with ice? Thanks.”
The waitress, whose name tag said Sal, blinked a couple of times behind oversize bifocals, then said, “Want french fries?”
“Absolutely. And some ketchup, please.”
When she’d gone, Nora reached for her purse and dug out the note from Stephen. She’d found it in there at the gas station a few miles back, when she fished for her wallet to pay for gasoline.
The note provoked the same giddiness in her now that it did the first time she read it at the gas pump. Stephen’s hand-scrawled message was playful and affectionate, talking about their future and joking about finishing law school “so I can become a public defender and start representing people who have no hope of paying me.”
That first time she’d read it, Nora felt tears on her cheeks and, after noticing the woman at the next gas pump looking at her, brushed them away with a chagrined smile.
Their future. Together.
Right there, at that moment in June 1967, Nora Levitsky—who’d once vowed she would never, ever get married—realized she was thinking about sharing a future with a husband.
Nothing was set. They’d barely discussed the subject beyond the fact that both had confessed to not being repelled by the idea. For Nora, that in itself was a big step.
Nora had been conscious, from a young age, of the inherent unfairness in the larger world, vis-à-vis boys and girls and, when she got older, men and women. She was about to focus her entire career on that exact question. And yet here she was, thinking seriously about marrying Stephen Cantor, soon to be Stephen Cantor, Esq.
This, however, would not be a topic of conversation during the coming weekend at her parents’ house. The trip home from Syracuse was meant to be a stealth mission to check on her father, without giving away any of her own imminent plans.
As slow as the waitress’s pace was when she shuffled from the kitchen to Nora’s booth with her order, Nora was still impressed by how fast the food arrived. She took a bite of the sandwich. The bread was perfectly toasted and buttery, the sandwich’s center lush with the melted American cheese, which arrived in an optimal molten state: hot, but not so hot as to blister the roof of her mouth.
The sandwich was why she stopped at this diner, something she’d tried to do once on each round trip between Syracuse and Tarrytown.
She peeled a straw and inserted it in the fountain Coke. The first sip carried exactly the icy crackle of palate-cleansing crispness she craved. She wished she could share this place with Stephen: He’d love their fries, she thought, deciding he’d also be amused by this waitress.
Then she considered the possibility of introducing Stephen to her parents.
This was a nonstarter, a bad idea that made her lungs tighten with the earliest stirrings of asthma.
So why had she agreed when he suggested meeting them this weekend? Perhaps because he had been so sincere that it disarmed her.
When Stephen realized he would be in New York the same weekend she would be at her parents’, he said, “I could come up to Tarrytown on Friday night. Would that work? It would mean so much to me to meet your folks. You make your mother sound so intimidating. I don’t know what I’d do if she didn’t like me.”
“Well of course she’ll like you,” she’d lied.
Nora couldn’t think of a plausible reason to say no. Now she needed to find an excuse to keep this meeting from occurring. Nora loved Stephen and thought he was almost too good to be true. Yet she knew that, to her mother, Stephen would never be good enough.
Full stop.
Nora didn’t care what her mother thought. She never had. Her mother’s opinion of Stephen would have no bearing on Nora’s future with him, a fact she knew would set off fireworks when her mother figured it out. Nora wanted to avoid that confrontation this trip.
Excerpted from Hemlock Lane © 2025 by Marshall Fine. Reprinted with permission from Lake Union Publishing, an imprint of Amazon Publishing. All rights reserved.
