From a #1 New York Times bestselling author comes a powerful novel about family, the weight of secrets, the choices we make, and the repercussions of the decisions made for us.

Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from The Best We Could Hope For by Nicola Kraus, which is out May 1st 2025.

When Bunny Linden abandons her three children with her older sister, Jayne, in 1972, she knows Jayne will be the perfect mother. The mother Bunny, a teen runaway, could never be.

As months turn into years without word, Jayne and her husband, Rodger, a rising journalism star, strive to give the children the opportunity to flourish and feel loved. When Jayne and Rodger finally have a child of their own, a seemingly stable home is built. But then, after nearly a decade, Bunny resurfaces and sets a chain of events in motion that detonates all their lives.

As adults, their children try to reassemble the pieces and solve the mystery that has always haunted them. Who were their parents? What really happened between them? And who is ultimately to blame for the destruction? But will the answers they seek set them free―or lead to something far more damaging than anyone imagined?

Chapter 1

December 1943

Cherry Hill, Maryland

“You’re fine.” Margaret snaps the words at her daughter in the cold, still air. Air pregnant with snow. “Please stand up.” Even at four years old, Jayne knows as she collects herself from the frozen ground, lip quivering, that the please is not for her benefit. It’s a guard against the ladies gathered, the ones tacking red and green bunting to the front of their display tables, the ones who will judge her fuss. Who will judge her mother. “Honestly, those boys,” Margaret says with studied polite exasperation, also for effect. As though the boys in question, who just ran through the holiday bazaar knocking over chairs, spilling toolboxes, stealing Linzer cookies, and upending their half sister were not, in fact, her own.

The women give polite smiles in return, even though Jayne can tell that they think the Linden boys, twelve and thirteen already, ought to know better, ought to have been taught better. Jayne watches her mother turn away, tuck her boiled-wool cape a little closer around her. In the safekeeping of their three-story home, as she knits in the evenings, Margaret is always talking about their judgment, the townsfolk. That’s what she calls them: the townsfolk. As though she hadn’t grown up nestled under their chins, the soot from their bakery oven under her nails.

Jayne looks down at the broken angel in her hand and hiccups a small sob. She spent so many hours on it—wanting to contribute, as her mother exhorted. And now it’s in pieces.

“There, there,” Margaret says brusquely, wiping her calloused fingers roughly across Jayne’s cheek to dry her tears. She takes the severed paper wings and crushed pipe-cleaner halo and shoves the whole mess in her pocket. “Where’s your sister?”

Jayne extends a mittened hand from under her velvet cuff in the direction of the fir tree erected at the square’s center. They catch sight of little Bunny watching the older children hang strings of popcorn. The children whose coats do not have velvet cuffs.

“Keep an eye on her,” Margaret instructs. “I have a lot of work to do.”

Jayne knows that, as Joseph Linden’s wife and therefore head of the Ladies Auxiliary, her mother always has a lot of work to do. The young mothers whose husbands are overseas need extras, as she calls them. She coordinates the donation of outgrown shoes, organizes the days of vegetable canning, the distribution. She’s not a war widow herself, but after losing her first husband in a roofing accident, she understands being left in the lurch.

Margaret returns to the unsolicited work of straightening another woman’s holly-berry tablecloth, repositioning a tower of fruitcakes. “There.” She moves on to a table of jams manned by two young widows all in black. At home Jayne has watched her mutter, sewing needle momentarily clamped between her teeth, Oh, to have been one of them when the boys were small—to have had commiseration and compassion, a pension, an actual pension. Jayne can hear Margaret clear the jealousy from her throat. “Jaynie, now.”

Jayne nods solemnly and walks toward her sister, understanding that there is no justice forthcoming. That her half brothers, already significantly taller and broader than her father even in the special shoe that levels his gait, can wreak whatever havoc they like. Her wrist smarting, she weaves carefully between the men carrying tables, wondering if she will still be allowed a ginger cookie later, now that her contribution is no more than trash, now that there is nothing to reward.

She approaches the spot where they will gather after the fair to sing carols and Father Houlihan will lead the service and they will have to behave. Michael and Luke have already been exempted.

“Bunny,” Jayne calls, and her little sister turns. The two-year-old has something in her mouth, her rosy left cheek swollen, drool bubbling over her bottom lip.

“Bunny, what do you have?” Jayne demands.

Bunny’s green eyes widen, and she tries to purse her mouth closed, but there’s no room, and she begins to laugh, exposing a giant half-masticated caramel balanced on her tongue.

Jayne is furious. “Where did you get that?”

“It’s a treat.” She cannot pronounce her r’s yet. It comes out as tweet.

“That’s not fair.”

Giggles shaking her, Bunny struggles to hold on to the candy, finally spitting it into her mitten like a torpedo. Bunny raises the candy back to her mouth, bites off half, and then holds out the other fuzz-speckled half to her sister.

“I don’t want that,” Jayne rebuffs, tears of frustration welling. “I want my own.”

Bunny shrugs and pops the rest in her distended cheeks, now evenly chipmunked on each side, stretching out her dimples.

“Bunny, you tell me right now. Who gave that to you?”

But Bunny just shakes her head, pin curls wobbling before she says solemnly in her small voice, “Jaynie, it’s a secret.”

Chapter 2

September 1957

Cambridge, Massachusetts

After years of lobbying to be sent away to school, for her father to make the investment, the first weeks at Radcliffe are exhilarating. Even as Jayne tries to find where she belongs. Coming from rural Maryland, she lacks the vernacular of the girls from the elite finishing schools—she’s never been to Europe, never done a “crossing,” her mother does not make “shopping trips to the city.” Her clothes don’t have department store tags because Margaret makes most of them on her Swing-Needle Singer Automatic.

Yet Jayne still finds herself invited, included, asked along—to the library, the ice-cream shop, the dining hall. And when asked where she’s from, what her father does, she finds she can choose. She can paint a picture where perhaps this man, who does own much of what is now a burgeoning suburb of Baltimore, stands tall beneath a fedora, a handsome face in shadow. Perhaps her mother eagerly awaits his return in the evening, cocktail in hand, and perhaps they all gather in the sitting room and play cards.

She references Michael and Luke, her significantly older brothers, as though suggesting these strapping men have good jobs, might visit one weekend, might want to date a girl on her hall. When in fact they moved out west years ago after one too many run-ins with the local law enforcement. She isn’t lying so much as simply nodding along with the other girls’ childhoods as if she understands.

Then, one afternoon in late October, when the air has turned blustery and the red bricks are mirrored in the leaves, there’s a call for her.

“What do you mean she’s gone?” Jayne asks her mother, gripping the residence hall’s communal phone, which smells permanently of cigarettes and Pond’s.

Margaret relays the facts briskly. “When I went to wake her for school last Wednesday, she wasn’t there.”

“Last Wednesday! Have you called the police?” Jayne’s knees feel rubbery.

“There’s no need. She left, Jaynie. Left of her own accord. And either she will come to her senses and return or she won’t.”

An uncomfortable heat fills Jayne’s face. Is fainting even permissible? She clutches the receiver with both hands like it can keep her upright; rumors, her mother has told her often enough, aren’t a dress or a hairdo that can be altered later to flatter. They’re a scar on your face that there’s no living down.

“I don’t understand, Mama. Gone where? And why? She’s only sixteen—why on earth would she leave?”

But Margaret Linden has no satisfactory answer. Not then, not ever.

As the months wear on, having been given strict instructions—“We’ll manage.”—Jayne finds she somehow does. Manages to cry quietly, and only in the shower behind the thick oak door. Manages to make her face and assemble her outfits and listen—just enough—to acquit herself in class and make friends and double date. She even manages to go home, to tolerate the place where Bunny isn’t, and her parents, who won’t discuss it.

“Jayne,” her mother castigates her upon finding her forlorn at the sight of Bunny’s Christmas stocking languishing at the bottom of a carton. “Why do you insist on carrying on?”

“Because it’s my fault,” she tries to explain.

“What is?”

Jayne looks at her mother’s face, settled into a lattice of scorn, vertical lines between brows, thin mouth compressed permanently into an angry horizontal. And now she’s unable to enumerate why exactly. “All of it.”

Margaret scoffs, moves on with looking for her bifocals. The ones that don’t just enable needlepoint one minute and a sharp eye on Jayne’s posture the next, but how Margaret Linden views the world. Looking up and out to the surrounding hills and the town beyond, she sees clearly, distinguishing briskly between those who truly deserve aid from the Auxiliary and those who just made poor choices. But looking down into the folds of their home, her perspicacity dissipates.

“Your sister made a choice, Jaynie. Don’t ever forget that.”

At the beginning of Jayne’s sophomore year, the first letter arrives, postmarked Georgia. It waits, sheepishly, on the marble table with everyone else’s pedestrian mail, dime-store cards from girlfriends at other Seven Sisters schools, telegrams from beaus seeking pick-up confirmations, and brown-paper-wrapped packages from home containing reports of younger siblings who are where they’re supposed to be, doing what they’re supposed to do.

And sitting among those bright and boisterous voices is Bunny.

Jaynie, I’m so sorry,

I know you must hate me. It’s impossible to put any of this into words so it could make sense to you. It was bearable while you were home—

Bearable? She’d never been hit like their brothers. Or grilled at dinner as though applying for a job. Bunny had always been their father’s blatant favorite. She wasn’t even forced to wear Jayne’s hand-me-downs—their father wouldn’t hear of it. She had new ice skates and pearl earrings—real pearls. Yes, their mother was . . . exacting, but that was surely bearable.

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But those last few weeks there alone with them. I just couldn’t. I needed to find a place where I could just be.

Jayne doesn’t understand. Everyone hates being a teenager. Everyone can’t wait to get away. Why couldn’t Bunny have just been patient?

Bunny goes on to explain that, at first, she thought she could follow Luke and Michael out west, but once she found their unopened letters in Margaret’s hope chest, and looked up Jackson Hole on the map, she abandoned that prospect. Then she remembered a man she’d met at the Horned Owl who made produce runs from farms in the south to their suburb of Baltimore—

Jayne pauses at this, lowering the pages to her wool skirt. The Horned Owl? That Bunny had spent her summer evenings not on the Broadkill boardwalk with the other kids but at a bar is a surprise to Jayne. But she had been on the boardwalk. And Bunny had not. Where had Jayne thought she was? Why hadn’t she paid more attention?

So, I’m in Georgia, on a farm here run by two couples along Christian principles, as they see them, meaning blacks and whites working beside each other and paid equally. It’s really a marvelous thing, Jaynie. We’ve attracted a little attention in town, but nothing to worry about. I hope you’re well and enjoying school and that you can find a way to understand that I had to go. I am sending you my love. Please write and tell me how you are.

Yours, Bunny

The paper in her hands notifies Jayne that she’s trembling, flooded with relief and rage in equal measure. The selfishness. The raw, audacious selfishness. Did she not think we’d be worried?

Clutching the envelope, she trips down the stairs to the phone, the one that no longer smells like anything now that Jayne is also cloaked in Pall Malls and Jean Naté. Bunny has an address. This can all be over.

“Connecting you now,” the operator says.

“Hello?” Margaret’s voice comes down the line, pushing itself through cables and wires with its plump truculence.

“It’s me, Jaynie.”

“Jaynie, is everything all right?” Jayne can picture her mother’s look of alarm at the cost of the call.

“Yes. I—I’ve had a letter,” Jayne says urgently, “from Bunny.”

There’s a pause. Jayne waits, heart drumming, glancing up and down the worn Oriental carpet, the numerous nicks in the baseboard.

“Barbara is dead, Jayne.”

“No, Mama,” she rushes breathlessly, “I’ve just had a letter. She’s in Georgia!”

Another silence. Another crinkle down the line, like wax paper being carefully unwrapped, and Jayne imagines that whoever is connecting the call is eating a sandwich.

“Barbara is gone.” Margaret speaks the words carefully, and Jayne pictures the ferocity of her mother’s gaze. “This has been a very hard year for your father and me, and it’s better if we don’t all have to go through this again. I can’t have her turning back up here and then running off. I trust this is the last we’ll speak of this?”

“Of course,” Jayne says, thinking, What? No, wait.

“Let me know when you’ve decided your Thanksgiving plans. If I need to cook for three.” There is never any suggestion of their visiting.

“Okay, yes. I’ll, uh, I’ll let you know.” As she replaces the receiver, any lingering indignation leaves abruptly, like a guest who’s suddenly realized he’s too drunk.

She returns to her room, with its crimson pennants hanging from a ribbon she tacked to the wall, thinking, Penance. Sitting at her battered desk, she takes out a sheet of stationery. And then she finds herself struggling to communicate with someone with whom she shared a room for sixteen years, their nightly baths, sometimes a single brass bed, nose to nose, their combined breath a gently souring cloud hovering between them. She knows the feel of Bunny’s skin, how it changed from the pale softness of childhood to the scab-kneed, tan shell of adolescence. That when it’s her time of the month, she needs to lie down with a compress until the pain passes. But she says none of this. Instead, she begs Bunny to come home, stay in touch, stay safe, all the while thinking, I miss you, I miss you, I miss you.

In return, long letters on tissue-thin paper arrive, defiant in their exuberance as they detail a life agrarian in its mission, wholesome in its outlook. But the manic quality of Bunny’s descriptions always gives Jayne pause, and when the disillusion comes—as it inevitably does when over a thousand people choose to live together because they cannot function elsewhere, ultimately afterbirthing friction, frailty, and abuse—Jayne loses Bunny a second time.