THE LIFE INTENDED

Harmel (The Sweetness of Forgetting, 2013, etc.) takes on relationships, family and loss.

Twelve years ago, Kate Waithman’s husband, Patrick, died suddenly in a car accident. Now 40, Kate has never truly recovered, but she has managed to make a decent life for herself. She’s an established music therapist for children, she has the emotional support of a best friend and a close sister, and she’s even poised to move on romantically, accepting a proposal from her good-on-paper boyfriend, Dan. But the night of their engagement, Kate has a dream about Patrick so vivid and uncanny that it’s clear—at least to her—that she’s experiencing the life she would have led had Patrick lived. Subsequent dreams introduce her to a daughter, a lovely, deaf piano prodigy named Hannah. Suspecting that Hannah may exist in real life, Kate compulsively begins to search for clues, signing up for a class in American Sign Language, volunteering with deaf foster children and throwing her existing life into turmoil. Dan is less than understanding, though she tells him little. Her other loved ones question her choices as well as her sanity, and Kate is torn. Have the dreams awakened her long-dormant gut instincts, her desire for a more robust happiness? Or is she simply too eager to exchange the normalcy of the present for the glow of the past? After a loss like hers, how much should be thrown away and how much kept in the rebuilding? Tensions around these questions add to the mystery of the dreams themselves to make for an absorbing read.

Though elements of the plot are predictable and the prose is unadorned, this book is well-paced and warmhearted.