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The Good Girl: From a Tortured Marriage to a Love Worth Choosing
Paperback
Publisher: Jeffrey Rittenhouse
Published: Apr 14 2026
Pages: 354
Weight: 1.04
Height: 0.74 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
She had spent eight years putting beauty inside things.
Now she was letting the beauty be on the outside.
She was no longer two things. She was whole.
Sue Pearl is a good girl. She keeps her husband's secrets, pays his debts, absorbs his failures, and sews coral silk linings into the blazers she designs for other women, hidden beauty no one will ever see. For eight years, she has kept her marriage intact by keeping herself invisible. Brad doesn't work. Brad doesn't try. Brad sits in a gaming chair while twenty-three thousand dollars of credit card debt accumulates in her name. But Sue stays, because staying is what good girls do.
Then she meets Alex Rivera.
Alex is fifty-five, a photographer, a man who lost his son and rebuilt his life behind a camera lens. He walks into a conference room and sees something in Sue's designs that no one else has seen-the woman who made them. On a dawn shoot along the Manayunk Towpath, he photographs not the swimwear campaign but the person inside it: a woman on the edge of leaving everything she knows.
What follows is not a rescue. It is a reckoning.
Sue dismantles her marriage, files for divorce, confronts Brad's escalating surveillance, and navigates the legal system that will determine her freedom. She builds something of her own for the first time in her life. A collection called Pearl. An apartment with a south-facing window. A career that carries her name. And a relationship with a man who understands that the most important thing he can offer is not protection but patience: the willingness to wait until she is free to choose him, rather than taking what the crisis makes available.
Set across the neighborhoods of Philadelphia. From the rowhouses of Manayunk to the studios of Fishtown, from the courtrooms of Arch Street to a coffee shop in Graduate Hospital with truly terrible lighting. The Good Girl is a novel about what happens when a woman who has spent her life hiding decides to be seen. About the difference between a man who grips and a man who holds. About the beauty that forms around a wound when you give it enough time, pressure, and grace.
It is a love story. But first, it is a story about learning to love yourself enough to leave.
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