Mia, Laney, Betts, and Ginger have reunited to celebrate Betts’s appointment to the Supreme Court. But when Senate hearings uncover a deeply buried skeleton in the friends’ collective closet, they retreat to a summer house on the Chesapeake Bay, where they find themselves reliving a much darker period in their past—one that stirs up secrets they’ve kept for, and from, one another, and could change their lives forever. “A must read . . . Share [it] with your mom. And your best friend.”—Chicago Examiner “A wonderful look at the complexities of friendship, the bonds between mothers and daughters, and the intricate interrelationships women form.”—Bookreporter.com   “Riveting.”— Tucson Citizen   “Every reader searches for that perfect book: the one that gives you a giddy feeling of anticipation when you think of it waiting for you on your night table. The Four Ms. Bradwells succeeds easily in meeting this mark.”— Woodbury Magazine   “A stirring and compelling novel about women’s changing roles.”— Booklist   “Deftly plotted and paced . . . Clayton keeps the plot layered and intriguing.”— Palo Alto Weekly   “The accomplished career gals at the center of Clayton’s satisfying third novel, The Four Ms. Bradwells, are strong characters we can relate to.”— More Meg Waite Clayton is the author of the national bestseller The Wednesday Sisters and The Language of Light, a finalist for the Bellwether Prize. A graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, she lives in Palo Alto, California, with her husband and their two sons. Mia Room 216, the Hart Building, Washington, D.C. Friday, October 8 Betts is sitting alone at a table with two untouched water cups, the pen I gave her the day we graduated from law school, a clean legal pad, and a microphone. On the dais, one of nineteen senators talks his way toward a question he hasn’t arrived at quite yet. Cameras whir mercilessly as photographers on the floor between them vie for the better angle, capturing the small fatty deposit on Betts’s freckled face, her perky mouth and shattered-crystal eyes. The chair she sits in is poorly chosen; her square diver’s shoulders, in a suit the washed driftwood gray of her hair, fail to top its leather back. Still, she looks impressive as she leans toward the microphone, listening in the same intent way she has always listened to Ginger and Laney and me—the way we all need to be heard. The senator’s voice booms, “You were born in an Eastern Bloc country, Professor Zhukovski, a communist child of communist parents,” as if this is something she might not have realized. The photographers edge closer on the journalistic racing pit of a floor, none pausing for fresh batteries or different lenses. Television cameras, too, peer down from booths in the side walls, relentlessly recording each intake of breath. “At least the TV cameras are shooting me from above,” Betts had joked over the phone a few nights ago. “The still photographers are shooting right at my crepey old neck.” My own crepey old neck feels warm and moist as I stand at the back of the room, behind the computer-laden tables of reporters. Betts has already answered a week’s worth of questions, though, sticking to the script. She praised Brown v. Board and deplored Dred Scott and Korematsu, uttered “right to privacy” and “stare decisis” while avoiding “abortion,” “gay rights,” and “guns.” She’s managed to appear to answer every question without actually stating a single view, all while demonstrating that she has great judgment without ever having been a judge. And the committee vote is scheduled for Tuesday, with the full Senate expected to confirm. “How are we supposed to believe, Professor Zhukovski,” the senator asks finally, “that a communist child of communist parents is the best person in this whole free country to be the arbiter of our laws?” Betts smiles warmly. “My mother, a doctor in Poland, scrubbed floors here . . .” she responds, her voice rolling gently against the senator’s snap. A softer sort of self-possession than she uses in her classroom is called for here, where the minds she is working to win over are still overwhelmingly older, and white, and male. Scrubbed toilets, I’d suggested—words met with a long, expensive, overseas-line silence before Betts had responded, “You’ll be surprised when your mom dies, Mia, how much her dignity means to you.” She’s taken my advice, though, I realize with a small measure of triumph: she’s gotten a friendly senator to ask about the Widow Zhukovski fleeing Poland with Baby Betts in a way that doesn’t seem friendly. And the gang back here in the press gallery is taking copious notes. “My mother actually would have made an amazing justice,” Betts says. “A fact she would not have hesitated to tell you.” The senators laugh easily, as does the audience, the stenographer, and even the press. I was on assignment when Betts called to ask me to come for this weekend; we’d practically had to shout to be heard