Every Thursday at 4:30, Nora Ellis tells a man everything. She has never been in a room with him.
Nora is thirty-eight, teaches chemistry at a high school outside Toledo, Ohio, and has been married for almost twelve years to the kindest man she knows. Ben makes chili on Thursdays. Ben coaches Little League. Ben has no idea that, in Nora’s mind, their marriage ended a long time ago.
Since her father died, Nora has spent fifty minutes a week in her parked car, talking by video to a psychologist three hours away in Pittsburgh. Dr. Julian Ward is careful, funny and endlessly professional. He signs his messages “J.” She thinks about him every day.
She doesn’t want to leave her marriage for a man who may feel nothing for her. But she can’t stop wondering. And when she finally asks him a question he isn’t allowed to answer, it sets off two years that will cost all three of them almost everything: a husband who never needed to check, a best friend who is also his cousin, and a man who has spent his whole career keeping the rules that protect people like her. Including the rule that now stands between them.
Same Time Next Week is a tender, funny and devastating novel about the end of a marriage, the danger and comfort of being truly seen, and the difference between kind and right.
About the author
Maya Gammel
Maya Gammel grew up in northwest Ohio and still lives there, in an old house with a porch she has been meaning to paint for six years. She runs most mornings, slowly, and writes in the hour before anyone else in the house is up.
She writes about ordinary people in ordinary Midwestern places, at the point where their lives come quietly apart: the marriage that ended years before anyone said so, the friend who knows too much, the rules people keep for good reasons, and what keeping them costs.
Same Time Next Week, her first novel, began with a woman she couldn’t stop picturing: a chemistry teacher in a parked car at half past four on a Thursday, waiting for a video call to start.
She has read more books in parked cars than anywhere else.
Contact
Write to Maya on Instagram
The way to reach Maya is a message on Instagram, where she’s @mayagammel. Readers, book clubs and reviewers are all welcome. She reads every message and answers when she can.