Open Enrollment

a novel

By: Emily Dubois

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Three women. One lease. A family society refuses to count.

Twelve years ago, Elizabeth knocked on Dani's dorm-room door holding a bottle of warm grocery-store wine and no glasses. They have been the fixed point in each other's lives ever since, and neither of them has ever once said the thing.

Then Dani is laid off by a machine she trained, with nine days before her health insurance lapses—and Elizabeth, who has never lost an argument she had time to prepare for, proposes the cleanest solution available. A paper marriage. A memorandum. Two signatures and a benefits plan.

It holds for about six weeks.

What neither of them sees is Ariel: the friend who arrives every Friday, barefoot inside a minute, adjudicating the wine—a sociologist of chosen families who cannot read the one she is standing in.

A novel about coverage, in every sense of the word. About the arithmetic strangers do when they look at a family that does not fit. About three women who each privately believed she was the one who would eventually be asked to leave.

Nobody was asked to leave.