"Within Reach"

Available in EPUB and MOBI formats. Read on your Kindle, phone, tablet, computer and more

She only ever wanted to be useful. The war showed her what that costs. Bisbee, Arizona, 1940. Helen Calloway keeps her widowed father's house exactly as her mother left it — the chair no one moves, the two photographs on the mantel, the porcelain parrot with the chip under its wing, the dust that never quite comes clean. She wants only to be useful, to help. Then Paris falls on the parlor radio, and useful begins to mean something far larger than one quiet house. By 1944 she is an Army combat nurse in a canvas surgical tent within range of the German guns. There Helen finds she can do the thing that breaks other people: hold the table steady while the shells walk closer, read a dying man by the gray of his skin, keep her hands moving long after the screaming has stopped reaching her. The Army makes her the nurse it wants. It never asks what that will take from her. The front has its own rules for women — about what gets written on a form, what is called by a tidy Latin name, what a body is and isn't permitted to be. Helen learns them the hard way, and folds what she learns down out of sight to carry home. In 1946 she comes back to Bisbee — to her father's chair, her mother's parrot, and a town that still remembers a girl who only wanted to help. Everyone expects her to settle back into the space she left. But the woman who set down her kit in France is not the girl who picked up the dust cloth, and this time the house will have to make room for who she has become. For readers who love sweeping novels of the women who served — and the Army nurses of When We Had Wings — Within Reach is a quiet, unflinching novel about competence and its price, the things war leaves under a woman's skin, and the slow, stubborn work of coming home to yourself. Within Reach is the prequel to the Legacy's Child series — the origin of the woman at its heart