On a Quiet Street

Leah has the marriage and the address she wanted: a quiet tree-lined street, a husband, Cain, who has never given her cause to look twice.

Then Charlotte turns up on the doorstep. She is eighteen, she was adopted as a baby, and she has been told her biological parents live at this house.

Leah's immediate conclusion is the obvious one, that Cain has a daughter from before her that he has never mentioned, and she starts working out what else he might not have said. Then Charlotte produces something that points in a different direction entirely, at the part of Leah's own history she has kept out of this life. Carla Kovach spends the rest of the book on which of the two of them is more exposed by the girl on the step.