Excerpt from The New Earth by Jess Row, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She's looking at her hands again.

"I remember," she says, "and forgive me for mentioning it, but back when your daughter passed ..."

(She didn't pass. She never passed.)

"... and Stan said, that guy works at Fein Lewin, I know him, I've seen pictures of that poor girl on his desk. I remember that. Watching the news about it, and thinking, that could have been so many of us. Our kids. Whatever else you want to say, she was an idealist. There aren't many of them left. That's what I appreciate. Even if she was, I don't know, misled. And there was so much hate being expressed about her. I don't have to tell you that. Our supposedly liberal friends, Stan always said. It was sickening, to me. I was almost physically ill. I just have to say that. Never having met you."

This is my meeting, he wants to say. I called this consultation, and you can go now. And then: oh go ahead and sell her, sell your dead child. As if it's never happened before. It's a relationship business.

Sympathy drives relationships. In the short term. It works only as a clincher, when the rational faculties are spent. Someone could write a book about it. Personal Tragedy: The Art of the Deal.

"Well, thanks, Ruth. Thanks for those kind words. I appreciate it."

"There was a saying we had," she says. "At the farm. Justice has to come from everywhere or it exists nowhere. We really believed that. Looking back, it seems like a nightmarish thing to imagine, in a way. The either/or part, I mean. But that's where we were at in those days. And when I heard about Bering, I felt like, that girl was one of us, so to speak."

Now he has to imagine sleeping with her. It worked, once upon a time. It got him through interviews, back when they were still giving interviews. Never, though, with a woman quite this far along. Not so much in years, or in gravitational compromises, as in sheer compactness of spirit. You see these women all over the neighborhood now. How would you go about seducing such a person? What would be your point of entry, physically, literally? Would you take her hand? Find a particularly appealing fold in her elbow crease?

Naomi isn't like that. There's still give.

"Thank you," he says. Without knowing why. "I appreciate that. I really do." More filler. "But you want to know why I'm bringing this up, Ruth? Because, as far as I can tell, you've lived a good life, a well-intentioned life."

"Psssht."

"And yet. And yet. The world goes the way it goes. There are unintended consequences."

"That's the understatement of the millennium."

"And thus the congestion. It hurts, but feel glad that it hurts. Getting wrapped up in a lawsuit is going to rob you of that capacity. You'll be a little twig flushed over a waterfall. Your savings, your health, whatever hard-won emotional stability you have—it all goes. Take it from someone who's barely escaped this profession with his mind intact. There's nothing the law can't take from you. So what I'm asking you to do is, don't take the bait. Look at yourself. You've already given so much. You have! We've given so much. It's true that not everything worked out the way we wanted. By a long shot. But you have to step back and reassess who you're really doing it for. The kids are grown and gone. Your protégés, your students, whoever, if you were lucky to have any—you taught them what you knew. You made an impact. I promise you that. But it's time for people like us to start taking care of ourselves. The world has used us up and frankly we've used up our share of the world."

"I was cc'd on an email," she says, "and this is just one tiny example, believe me, but I was mistakenly cc'd on an email in which the first chair said, 'She's had that stick up her ass so long, if you took it out she'd have to have reconstructive surgery.'"

"Yes, you were insulted. I'm sorry. Yes, the process was abused. Your colleagues treated you badly and should apologize. But I'm telling you that you have to stop trying to be the arbiter of everything. I know the last thing you ever expected was for someone to tell you to take a load off and not take everything so seriously. That's why it has to come from a fellow traveler like me. Stop ignoring your grandkids. Before you know it they'll be grown and gone, too, and you'll be moldering alone. Cultivate those ties. What do you want, at your time of life, at our time of life, with a lawsuit? Not that you can't afford it. I'm casting no aspersions. And believe me, there's lawyers in this town, in this building, on this floor, who will take your money. But you don't need it. We don't need it, any of us."

Excerpted from The New Earth by Jess Row. Copyright © 2023 by Jess Row. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.