This is Book Two of The Work of Becoming trilogy. Book One, Learning to Breathe Again, is also available on NetGalley and is best read first. Reviewers are welcome to request both.

Two women. The lives they built. The choices that could cost them everything.

New York City, 1939. Elena Wagner appears to have everything she ever wanted. A successful husband. An adorable daughter. A place among friends on the Upper West Side. But as her husband draws her deeper into the city's fascist movement, she learns that belonging comes at a price. The rallies grow louder. The lies grow easier. And the woman she's becoming is someone she barely recognizes.

Mary Simons has chosen a different path. In a world that tells women what they can’t do, she is determined to pursue an advanced degree in pharmaceutical research, work that could save countless lives. But it also pulls her two hundred miles from her husband. The cost of her ambition is an empty apartment to come home to.

As war threatens to tear their worlds apart, Mary fights to close the distance between herself and the husband she loves, and promises Elena a safe place to land—if escape is even possible.

Both women must decide what they're willing to sacrifice, and what they refuse to surrender.

For readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds, Fiona Davis's The Spectacular, and Martha Hall Kelly's Lilac Girls.