Don’t Tell Anyone
by Laurie Boris
Genre: Contemporary fiction
Word count: Approx. 65,000
Landing in the emergency room nearly unconscious from pneumonia, sixty-five-year-old Estelle Trager is forced to admit that she’s been living with potentially malignant tumors in both breasts…for five years. Now her son Adam and his wife, Liza, know about her deadly secret. Adam is hurt and outraged to learn that his mother had intended to take this to her grave. But Estelle, who watched her mother and grandmother suffer from breast cancer in the days when no one dared speak its name, has no intention of putting her family or herself through the horrors of cancer treatment. Estelle decides there is only one solution: ask Liza, the thirty-three-year-old daughter-in-law she once called a godless hippie raised by wolves, to kill her.
A horrified Liza refuses and keeps the request—among other things—a secret from her furious husband. But she tells his charismatic younger brother, Charlie, a close friend from college with whom she shares her own confidences, despite Adam’s serious case of sibling rivalry. Armed with nutrition textbooks and her neighbor, a savvy nurse, can Liza win over her mother-in-law and convince her to consider other options before the cancer, the secrets, and Estelle’s determination to end her life win out?
This book is available from Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble.