Excerpt from Only the Beautiful by Susan Meissner, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I look longingly at the vines as we pass them on the gravel drive, rows and rows of them. I love all the colors of this place, and the chuffing of nearby tractors and the neighbor's roosters and my father's whistling. They'd always been such happy sounds, happy colors. Oh, how I will miss them.

As we turn onto the road to Santa Rosa, I reach for my bag and lift it over the seat to make sure all that I put inside it is still there: the few items of clothing that still fit me, my worn copy of The Secret Garden, the photograph of me and Tommy and my parents, my cigar box full of my savings, the baking soda tin with the amaryllis bulb and the instructions on how to care for it . . .

It's all there except for the bundle of Helen Calvert's letters inside the cigar box. My money is still inside it, but the letters from Truman's sister are gone.

Before I can even begin to mourn their loss, Mrs. Grissom asks me why of all things I have a dirty old turnip in my travel bag.

I turn to stare at her. "You looked in my bag, too?"

"We had to make sure you weren't taking anything that wasn't . . ." Her voice drifts off.

"Mine?"

"Safe."

"It's not a turnip." I turn back to the window. "It's an amaryllis bulb."

"A what?"

"An amaryllis. A flower bulb."

"But why do you have it?"

I don't want to explain why I have it. And I don't feel like telling her the dirty little turnip is not what it looks like. It is more. It is something beautiful, hidden but there. Helen Calvert, who lives far across the sea, wrote words like those about the amaryllis bulb when she gave it to me. I've held on to them and the bulb because I've needed to believe they are true.

"Because it's mine," I say. "And so were those letters I had in my bag."

"They weren't addressed to you. Mrs. Calvert said they were hers and Mr. Calvert's."

"Not all of them were. Some of them were mine. And they had given the others to me. Those letters were mine."

Mrs. Grissom is quiet for many long moments.

"Care to tell me how you got into this mess?" she finally says, as though it doesn't matter who the rightful owner of those letters is. We aren't going back for them.

"No." I reach again to touch the little key hiding behind the pendant. I don't care to tell her. I won't.

"Things would go easier if you told me the truth about . . ." She glances at the slight bump at my waist. "You know. How this happened."

"Would it change where you're taking me?"

"Well, no."

"It happened the usual way, Mrs. Grissom."

The county worker sighs, shakes her head, and turns her attention fully back to the road.

I remove the tissue-­thin paper of instructions on how to care for an amaryllis from within the baking soda tin—­which Celine obviously missed when she went through my bag—­and place the only letter from Helen left to me inside the cigar box where all the others had been. I return the bag to its place on the back seat.

We drive into Santa Rosa, then through it, and then we pass over to rolling hillsides on its other side, blanketed with vineyards and scattered sycamore and bushy acacia trees.

"Is it a nice place? Where you're taking me?" I ask as we turn onto a road I have never been down before.

Mrs. Grissom purses her lips before answering. "It's a respected place for people who need help, Rosanne. You need help and that's what's important. I suppose in its own way it's nice."

It will be something like a boardinghouse, I imagine, run by tsking older women who will look down on me in disapproval. I'll be rooming with other fallen girls who have gotten themselves in trouble, and we will surely be reminded daily of our failure to make good choices. Why aren't there places like that for fallen men, I wonder, where they are tsked and told every day that their recklessness has led to disaster?

Excerpted from Only the Beautiful by Susan Meissner. Copyright © 2023 by Susan Meissner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.