Her Mother's Secret

Summary

A tempest of bloodlines and brine, Her Mother’s Secret unspools like a tintype negative left too long in salt air: Seth Cartwright, Manhattan magnate with a matrimonial face of marble, sheds his clandestine mistress Bernice Archer the way a snake sloughs skin—casually, cruelly, whole. Bernice, dazed by kerosene lamplight and the sudden chill of abandonment, deposits their infant daughter Loma on the marble stoop of Seth’s rightful mansion, a foundling bathed in the guilt of two houses. Seth’s wife—ice-veined, omniscient—accepts the child into gilded captivity, fully aware the baby’s eyes are her husband’s aquiline duplicate. One Atlantic crossing later, a vindictive reef gnaws the hull of an ocean-liner; the Cartwright parental unit sinks into black water, but Loma, buoyed by life-vest and cosmic irony, washes back into Bernice’s arms on a fog-draped wharf. Mother and daughter reinvent themselves in a weather-beaten hamlet where salt eats paint and secrets cling like barnacles. Years ferment; Loma becomes a prism of sea-glass beauty, catching light—and the gaze of Seth Jr., urban dilettante fleeing family ghosts. Their courtship is all clifftop picnics and phosphorescent tides until genealogy, that merciless dramaturge, reveals the shared marrow of their veins.

Synopsis

Seth Cartwright abandons his mistress Bernice Archer and their child, Loma, and returns to his wife and son. Bernice, in a daze, leaves Lorna, who is adopted by Cartwrght's wife, who knows full well who the child's father is. Unfortunately, she and her husband are killed in a shipwreck, but it turns out Loma and her real mother are reunited because of the wreck, and settle in a small seaside town. Matters get complicated when Seth Jr. arrives in the town for a vacation and falls in love with Lorna--not knowing that she is his half-sister.