Sarah's Child

Sarah's Child is a 1985 romance by Linda Howard. The novel begins from grief rather than courtship: a crash kills Rome Matthews's wife and their two little boys and also takes the life of Sarah Harper's closest friend.

The two survivors are left inside the same loss from different directions. Sarah has kept her distance for two years because the feeling she had for Rome was something she never admitted to him or to Diane, and the secret is the reason the story can generate tension from a marriage that both parties enter honestly. When Rome needs her, she agrees to be his wife on terms she understands, accepting that she comes second to a woman who has died.

Neither of them plans the development that follows, and it revives a hope Sarah had already given up on. Rome marries her while still measuring himself against the family he lost, which is what makes the terms she accepts so painful. The book has to decide whether the second marriage is a way of repairing the first one or a life with claims of its own, and it keeps that question open to the last chapters. Howard went on to a long career in romantic suspense built on a crime and the couple it throws together; this earlier title is the same marriage-of-convenience form working through bereavement.