Nora Bennett has turned thirty. The peach-colored panic of her twenties is gone.
What has arrived in its place is something harder and, to her private surprise, better —
attention.

Volume Two opens at a hotel restaurant on a Wednesday night, with Nora recognizing the subtle tan line
on a stranger's wedding finger — and discovering that the muscle she has been quietly building for
twenty chapters has, without her permission, made her professional. Across the next twenty evenings,
she sits across from a lawyer who is not, in fact, divorced; a bookshop-café feminist who has read
the bibliography but not the books; an old flame named Darius, who flies back from
three years of absence to find a woman he can no longer reach; and a lecturer named Philip,
who speaks uninterrupted for sixty-six minutes — and, several weeks later, writes the most
correctly-shaped apology Nora has ever received.

There is a solo dinner at a restaurant she has been saving for a man. A love-bomber caught in
the grammatical fossil of a single pronoun. A long-time friend named Ryan, who announces,
across a café table, that he has been loving her in silence for four years. And a wine bar on a Thursday,
a woman called Elena, and a five-word sentence placed between two glasses of red wine
that Nora will carry into the second half of her year like a small, hard compass.

The Lessons is the education. It is the volume in which Nora — quietly, without applause —
becomes the woman the first half of her life has been trying to write. It is also the volume in which
the drawer stops being a drawer, and becomes something closer to a map.