Marie Rutkoski

Emily has, by all appearances, a perfect life: a townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, two healthy children, and a husband who showers her with attention. But the truth is more complicated: Emily’s marriage is in trouble, her relationship with her parents is fraught, and she is still nursing a heartbreak from long ago. When Emily runs into her high school girlfriend at a cocktail party, that heartbreak comes roaring back. But Gen Hall is no longer the lanky, hungry kid with holes in her shoes who Emily loved in her youth. Instead, Gen is now a famous Olympic athlete with sponsorship deals and a string of high-profile ex-girlfriends.

Emily and Gen circle one another cautiously, drawn together by a magnetic attraction and scarred by their shared history. Once upon a time, Gen knew everything about Emily. And yet, she still abandoned her. Can Emily trust Gen again? Can they forgive each other for the mistakes they made in their past? Should Emily risk her children, her privacy, and the fragile peace she has found to be with a woman she loved long ago?

A sweeping romance, Ordinary Love is the beautiful, wrenching, completely seductive story of two people trying to forge a path toward hope, bound by a love they discovered when they were too young to understand its power.

A Novel

Ordinary Love

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She had the sense that her beauty was a story told about her and she wasn't its author. She didn't know how to make her beauty mean other than what people decided it meant, yet its value was obvious: a currency she possessed even though she was poor. 

When they reached the gym doors, Gen said, "Where did you plant the seeds?" "I didn't." "Oh." "I liked them too much," Emily said in a rush. "If I planted them, they'd grow but then they'd die. I liked imagining what they'd look like better than seeing what they did look like." 

Emily was also just old enough to dread another self-betrayal, and not old enough to know its inevitability.

A friend could miss a friend. That was normal. She thought that people always talked about hope like it was a good thing and no one warned that it could hurt. "I will miss you, too.” 

I stood, looking down the windowless hallway, closed doors on either side, and thought that this was how I have always felt: like a corridor, a space people pass through to get somewhere else. 

Gen hugged Emily-casually, as if this wasn't the first time they had touched in fifteen years. Gen smelled the same. She fit against Emily in the same way. Every response Emily had always had to Gen's body coursed through her. She felt a bone-deep, idiotic desire, no less strong for its familiarity, yet not quite the same as it had been in their past. It was sharper now, for its keen sense of impossibility, for how it revealed a longing not just for Gen but also for what they had once had, a longing so entwined with regret that the braided emotion was as tight as a whip.

How had she gotten so far? How much of that distance was due to Jack's persuasion, and how much to her own readiness to believe that despite always wanting to be recognized as worthy of attention, she never actually deserved it?

Sometimes happiness feels like an animal relief, like you've been let off your leash, told that you are good when you worried you'd been bad, allowed to run. To dig-for what? For nothing.

Who knew. For the feel of the upturned earth, the rich coolness of it, the smell of rain stored beneath sunny grass.

People talk about coming of age as if it only happens when you're young, as if entering adulthood means inhabiting a final era with no more moments when you say goodbye to an old life, but that couldn't be true, because she just had. 

And yet she also hadn't known. She had imagined other reac-tions, different words, ones of comfort—just as common, just as ordinary, because it is ordinary for a parent to love a child. It is ordinary for a parent to choose a child first. This should be as simple and sure as a rock that looks like nothing and that a child carries home as treasure. Emily had thought that maybe, if she told her father, he would choose her, but he didn't.

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