Counting Backwards by Jacqueline Friedland (EXCERPT)

We have a timely treat for you today, readers, with an excerpt from Jacqueline Friedland’s Counting Backwards. Told in two alternating narratives bound together by a shocking parallel of issues — including reproductive rights and society’s expectations of women and mothers — this novel is a compelling reminder that progress is rarely a straight line and always hard-won.

New York, 2022. Jessa Gidney is trying to have it all: a high-powered legal career, a meaningful marriage and hopefully, one day, a child. But when her professional ambitions come up short and Jessa finds herself at a turning point, she leans into her family’s history of activism by taking on pro bono work at a nearby detention center. There she meets Isobel Perez, a young mother fighting to stay with her daughter. As she gets to know Isobel, an unsettling revelation about Isobel’s health leads Jessa to uncover a horrifying pattern of medical malpractice within the detention facility… one that shockingly has ties to her own family.

Virginia, 1927. Carrie Buck is an ordinary young woman in the center of an extraordinary legal battle at the forefront of the American eugenics conversation. From a poor family, she was only six years old when she first became a ward of the state. Uneducated and without any support, she spends her youth dreaming about a future separate from her exploitative foster family, unaware of the ripples that her small country life will soon have on an entire nation.

As Jessa works to assemble a case against the prison and the crimes that she believes are being committed there, she discovers the landmark Supreme Court case involving Carrie Buck as well as its shocking implications for the one before her now. Her connection to the case, however, is deeper and much more personal than she ever knew, sending her down new paths that will leave her forever changed and determined to fight for these women, no matter the cost.

Read on for a tension-filled excerpt from Jessa’s personal life!

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This excerpt is from Counting Backwards, copyright 2025, published by Harper Muse. Reprinted by permission. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited.

Jessa

January 2022

If he caught me in the act, he’d be furious. I grabbed the white cardboard box off the bathroom counter and started tearing it into penny-sized pieces. I made sure to render each piece small enough that the picture of the baby on the packaging would be impossible to make out. After I’d created a small pile of fragments on the marble countertop, I wiped the whole mess into the shopping bag from the pharmacy, tied the handles into a tight knot, and tossed the bag into the trash. The test stick was resting between the double sinks. Behind it, a glass bottle holding a bouquet of skinny reeds emitted a pungent citrus scent. The air freshener had been a holiday gift from my friend Tate, but now the cloying notes of grapefruit were nearly turning my stomach. Maybe it was a sign.

Less than two minutes had elapsed so far. I stared at the strip of paper inside the little testing window, bending closer as it gradually became saturated. The control line had already begun to appear, faintly at first, but then stronger, a pink promise that this test was functional.

I stared so intently at the test that my vision began to blur, the one pink line morphing into a wavy haze of nothingness. If I focused hard enough, could I see just what I wanted to see? At the sounds of movement on the other side of the closed door, I flinched—Vance was waking up and beginning his day.

The timer on my phone showed another two minutes and fifteen seconds before the test would be finished.

“Jess?” Vance called from outside the door, his deep voice still thick with sleep. His footsteps came closer, and he jiggled the locked doorknob. “Can I come in?”

My eyes shot back to the test.

“Um . . . yeah! One sec!” I grabbed the stick and stashed it in the cabinet below my sink. Tossing a few tissues into the trash to bury the pharmacy bag, I gave the toilet a quick flush for good measure and then opened the door.

Vance waited at the threshold with bleary eyes and a dark shadow of stubble blanketing his wide jaw. The old Tufts University t-shirt he’d slept in stretched against the muscles of his chest, and his olive-toned legs, thick like logs, were on display beneath his black boxer briefs. The chain necklace he wore was askew, with its silver Star of David pendant dangling off to the side near his left shoulder. The necklace had belonged to his grandfather, and Vance almost never removed it.

“Babe,” he said as he pressed his warm lips to my forehead and then made his way past me toward the toilet. “Why’d you get up so early?” He didn’t wait for me to answer before adding, “I think I drank three liters of seltzer before I fell asleep. All that ponzu sauce at dinner. Salty.”

Vance and his business partner, Arjun, had taken a client out the night before. They’d gone to some fancy new Japanese restaurant on the Upper West Side that everyone was raving about. It was hard to keep track of the many trendy eateries that Vance and his partners visited in their ongoing efforts to impress their high maintenance clients.

Turning his back, he began to relieve himself. I wanted to keep guarding the hidden test, to make sure he didn’t go digging for shaving cream or extra deodorant in that undersink cabinet. But he would know something was off if I just stood there watching him urinate, wouldn’t he?

“I’d better get dressed,” I said. Even so, I made no move to leave. Instead, I studied myself in the wide mirror that was mounted on the wall behind the sinks, buying time by taking in my appearance. Unlike many of my friends, I thought I looked my best first thing in the morning. Right after waking up, there was a slight puffiness to my face that rendered my sharp cheekbones a little less severe and made the angles beneath my hazel eyes more mellow. I smoothed my brown curls half-heartedly, not minding that they were wild as usual. My mother, whose own bouncy curls had once rivaled my own, used to describe their constant tangles as “chaos incarnate.” All these years later, I could still hear the jingle of her laughter as she joked that trying to brush my hair in the bath was like participating in a sporting event. But I loved my hair. Not just because of the way the long flouncy curls seemed to be bursting with life, but also because of how each coiled tress allowed me to see a piece of my mother every time I glanced at my own reflection.

I leaned closer to the mirror, noticing a hint of purple beneath each eye. At thirty-one, I was often mistaken for a younger woman, which was fine, except at work. My physical appearance was just one more obstacle standing between me and the respect I wanted at my firm. The respect I deserved. I should have earned it by now. Instead, I was still scrambling to prove myself.

Vance looked over his shoulder at me as he continued to empty his bladder.

“You’re going in today?” he asked.

“Just for a couple of hours. LDP depositions start on Tuesday, remember?” I heard the snippiness in my tone. It was harsher than I’d intended, but I didn’t have it in me to apologize. Instead, I left him there and made my way to the closet in hopes that my exit from the bathroom would hasten his own.

When we’d found our apartment last summer, it had been a definite upgrade from the prewar walk-up we’d shared since our wedding five years earlier. The amenity that finally convinced me I could handle leaving the West Village to relocate to the stodgier, uninspired streets of the Upper East Side like Vance wanted was not one but two walk-in closets in the bedroom. The eat-in kitchen and spare bedroom weren’t so bad either. During our first visit to the apartment, we’d smiled tentatively at each other and talked about one day turning that second room into a nursery. My chest constricted remembering how hopeful we’d been then, even when we were still raw from our recent loss.

Choosing a semi-sheer floral blouse and a pair of navy slacks, I could already hear Tate in my mind, ribbing me for refusing to ever wear jeans to the office, even on a Saturday.

Vance was still clanging around in the bathroom, and it was all I could do not to shout at him to hurry it up. How much longer until I could get back to those results?

He called out to me then. “You remember I made us lunch plans with Mandy and Lou, right?”

Yeah. I remembered. But it wasn’t just Mandy and Lou. It was Mandy, Lou, and AnneElise, their adorable, pink-cheeked, eight month-old baby girl.

“Yup.” My voice was still more brittle than I intended, my frustration about the interrupted pregnancy test getting the better of me.

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From Counting Backwards by Jacqueline Friedland. Copyright © 2025 by the author and reprinted by permission.

Counting Backwards by Jacqueline Friedland was published March 11 2025 by Harper Muse and is available from all good booksellers, including