COME WITH ME

A new widow accepts help getting back on her feet from an old co-worker. The help is extravagantly generous, the price even higher.

Nobody expected Todd Maner to keel over and die of a heart attack at 33. Since he’d canceled his life insurance and plowed all his savings back into TeckPocket, the troubled company he’d co-founded in Boulder, his wife, Gwen, is left with nothing but their 8-year-old daughter, Whitney. Desperate, Gwen phones Nicola Kimmel back in Dayton, Ohio. They haven’t been in touch since the two of them were unpaid interns together at media agency Dack & Anders during their last year of college, but that’s the closest Gwen’s ever come to holding down a job, and she hopes that Nicola can give her a recommendation or point her toward some leads. She discovers to her astonishment that Nicola, who was never as close to her as she was to Missy, a third intern who recently went AWOL after rising through the ranks, can do much more. Now the second in command at Dack, Nicola asks for Gwen’s resume, offers her a job, persuades her colleagues to sign on by richly inflating Gwen’s credentials, and announces her appointment as Associate Vice President of Regional Development, with a salary and office to match. Back in Dayton with Jeri Gries, the diabetic mother who’s phoned her every day for years but never offered a helping hand, Gwen naturally leans into Nicola harder and harder. Eventually even she realizes there’s something funny about their relationship, which Flanagan explains up to a point through a series of flashbacks to Nicola’s disastrous early years with her own mother.

Forget where this is heading and enjoy the ride.