Yerba Buena

The novel follows two women, Sara Foster and Emilie, across more than a decade as their separate lives converge in Los Angeles.

Sara is fourteen, growing up along the Russian River in Northern California, secretly in love with a girl named Annie. They hike into the redwood forest and kiss in a grove of young trees. Sara's mother died two years earlier after a hospital stay tied to addiction, leaving Sara as primary caretaker for her younger brother, Spencer, while their father, Jack, is mostly absent. At the other end of the state, Emilie is a teenager at a Catholic school in Los Angeles. She tends the school garden with her friend Pablo Santos and his mother, who introduces her to yerba buena, a type of mint. That afternoon, Emilie's older sister, Colette, overdoses. Paramedics carry Colette out alive, and Emilie spends the night alone while her parents rush to the hospital.

Two years later, Annie disappears. Sara and her friends search without success, and Annie's twin brother, Dave, tells them they will drag the river. The next morning, they watch as Annie's body is lifted from the water. Before the search, Sara tells Jack she and Annie are more than friends. Jack leaves without a word and adds to the family's collaborative drawing on the kitchen table: Annie floating facedown in the river. Devastated, Sara sees escape in Grant, a transient boy she recently met at the motel where she works, who is heading to Los Angeles in his Honda Civic. Needing money, they visit Eugene, Jack's lifelong friend, who demands sex for three hundred dollars. Sara sets strict limits; Grant reluctantly agrees. Sara begs Spencer to come with her, but he refuses. She warns him to stay away from Eugene and drives south with Grant.

They run out of money at the base of the Tehachapi Mountains. Sara cleans motel rooms. A woman offers to set her up with truckers for sex work, and Sara nearly agrees, but the morning she is supposed to start, she gets her period and interprets her body's timing as an answer. She collects her wages, and they cross the mountains on their last dollars.

In Los Angeles, they find a youth shelter. Sara gets a restaurant job in Venice and rises from busser to hostess. A waitress named Chloe offers Sara her apartment lease and introduces her to Lillet, an aperitif served in a tiny etched glass with a strip of lemon peel. The ritual of pausing to mark a moment transforms Sara's understanding of drinks. She moves in alone, unable to invite Grant, and they lose touch.

Emilie drifts through her twenties, cycling through college majors until she lands on literature, her fifth. She takes a job at a flower shop and begins delivering arrangements to Yerba Buena, a restaurant run by chef Jacob Lowell. Emilie arranges flowers there twice a week, and Jacob starts joining her for breakfast. One morning, Sara arrives to consult on a cocktail menu. Emilie is immediately drawn to her, but Sara pulls back when she learns Emilie sits with Jacob.

Jacob and Emilie begin an affair. Emilie discovers a design blog featuring his family home, with photos of his wife, Lia, and their sons. On a trip to Topanga Canyon, they encounter police at a fatal hiking accident, and Emilie realizes no one would know where to find her, while Jacob's wife would know exactly. She confronts the affair, and Jacob calls the trip a mistake. The relationship ends.

Emilie finishes her degree and quits the flower shop. Her father, Bas, a contractor, asks her to care for her terminally ill grandmother, Claire. After Jack's arrest, a social worker contacts Sara, who briefly takes in Spencer, now fifteen, before he returns to their father. Sara has three names from the family drawing tattooed on her forearm: "Sara, Mom, Spencer," omitting Jack. She becomes lead bartender at a Venice restaurant before Jacob recruits her to Yerba Buena, where she adds mint to the signature cocktail, acknowledging the drink is incomplete without it.

Months later, Emilie appears at the bar. They flirt all night and walk hand in hand to Sara's apartment after closing. They discover a shared love of Nella Larsen's Passing and sleep together. For Sara, the experience is transformative: She feels simultaneously present with Emilie and transported back to the forest with Annie.

Sara wakes to voice mails: Spencer has been arrested. She drops a glass; Emilie steps on a shard and gashes her foot. Torn between crises, Sara wraps Emilie's foot and sends her to the hospital without taking her number.

After Claire's death, Emilie begins restoring Claire's house with Bas, who shares stories of the family's Creole migration from New Orleans to Los Angeles. Physical labor gives Emilie calluses, strength, and purpose. When her parents' marriage ends and Bas withdraws, Emilie finishes alone, mentored by a retired contractor named Ulan. The house sells quickly. She buys a dilapidated mansion in Long Beach, and Colette, returning from a therapeutic retreat, moves in.

One night at a restaurant, Emilie spots Sara. Sara asks for another chance and describes her dream of opening a bar in a vacant Hollywood storefront. Emilie says she doesn't want an explanation; she wants to move forward. The relationship deepens: Sara helps with the house, Emilie samples cocktail recipes, and Wednesday movie nights bring their friend groups together. Spencer, released from prison, joins their circle.

A hospital chaplain calls: Jack has died. Sara cries in Emilie's garden, her first tears in a decade, and tells Emilie everything: her mother's addiction, Annie, Jack's drawing, and how being with Emilie brought her back to feelings she thought were gone. The next morning, Sara expects Emilie to offer to accompany her to the Russian River. Emilie, following her lifelong pattern of staying quiet so others feel free to leave, offers only to water Sara's plants. Sara says Emilie can come, but the words land wrong. They part in tears.

At her childhood home, Sara and Spencer scatter Jack's ashes in the river. Her old friends gather and reveal the truth: Annie went to Jack for drugs, overdosed in Sara's house, and when they couldn't revive her, they hid her body in the river. Sara finds Jack's drawing in her bedroom closet and studies it: Annie with a single needle mark on her arm. Spencer tells her the drawing was a confession: Jack knew Sara would learn the truth and never forgive him, and he was letting her go. Dave and Lily, another childhood friend, add that Sara's mother, from her hospital bed, told Sara to take Spencer away from their father, though Sara has no memory of this. Sara and Dave push Jack's truck through Eugene's dock and into the river, then walk away.

Sara hikes into the forest that night and falls asleep in the grove where she and Annie once lay together. Spencer tells her he wants to stay in Guerneville, and she accepts.

Emilie, unable to sleep, drives to her old neighborhood and leaves Sara a raw voice mail confessing her fear of abandonment and asking Sara to come back. She sells the Long Beach mansion and, with Randy, Pablo's older brother, searches for a new home. Randy shows her a bungalow in the Hollywood Hills with kelly green shingles and diamond-paned windows. Sara sends a wordless photograph of her childhood kitchen at midnight; Emilie recognizes it as a love letter. At her old flower shop, Emilie chooses a yerba buena plant, tastes its leaf, and plants it in her new garden.

Sara arrives at Emilie's door and says she got the voice mail. Emilie envisions their future: Sara's bar, their intertwined lives, and the inevitable difficulties. Sara asks, "Let me in?" (290), and Emilie opens the door.