The First Bad Man

Cheryl Glickman is a single woman in her forties who runs her life through elaborate private systems. She nurses a decades-long crush on a board member named Phillip and believes she keeps meeting the same baby soul across different infants. Her careful order collapses when her bosses move their twenty-one-year-old daughter Clee into her home. Clee is hostile, loud, and physical, and the two women fall into staged confrontations that turn into something neither expected. The book follows Cheryl through obsession, an unlikely pregnancy, and a reordering of what family and love can mean.