Three years after Sabina walked into Andrei Vasilescu’s house in Lake Forest at the careful arithmetic of one debt, she is three months pregnant, writing a book about him, and answering the front-hall telephone on the morning of the seventh of May when Lev says — from his careful house in Highland Park — that Costin Drăgan has had a stroke at four in the morning.
A stroke means a dying man wants to confess. A confession means a debt. A debt means the vow Andrei made to the woman carrying his daughter — no more operations, no more bodies, no more careful arithmetic of harm — is about to be tested by something neither of them had been preparing for: not an enemy from the present, but an inheritance from the past.
Because the debt is not Drăgan’s.
The debt is Andrei’s father’s, paid in Bucharest blood in 1991, kept secret by the women of three Romanian kitchens for forty years, and now — with the death of one careful old man and the surfacing of one careful Romanian-American chronicle — about to come due in a marriage that has, for five years, been the only thing in either of their lives that has held.
The Vow is a literary dark romance about what a marriage is for after the rescue is over. About what it costs to keep a vow you didn’t know you were making. About the women who carry the weight of every family in the careful pockets of their aprons, and the men who, on the strength of one careful morning, learn to thank them.
It is the second book of The Vasilescu Trilogy, and the heart of it.
A stroke means a dying man wants to confess. A confession means a debt. A debt means the vow Andrei made to the woman carrying his daughter — no more operations, no more bodies, no more careful arithmetic of harm — is about to be tested by something neither of them had been preparing for: not an enemy from the present, but an inheritance from the past.
Because the debt is not Drăgan’s.
The debt is Andrei’s father’s, paid in Bucharest blood in 1991, kept secret by the women of three Romanian kitchens for forty years, and now — with the death of one careful old man and the surfacing of one careful Romanian-American chronicle — about to come due in a marriage that has, for five years, been the only thing in either of their lives that has held.
The Vow is a literary dark romance about what a marriage is for after the rescue is over. About what it costs to keep a vow you didn’t know you were making. About the women who carry the weight of every family in the careful pockets of their aprons, and the men who, on the strength of one careful morning, learn to thank them.
It is the second book of The Vasilescu Trilogy, and the heart of it.
Used availability for Danielle Kent's The Vow