It’s impossible to talk about any day in my life without first mentioning Addie and Penelope and Estella. We’re best friends from college, newly graduated and sharing a Georgetown rowhouse, a stone’s throw from our alma mater. We have great parties and crap jobs and boyfriends. It’s their friendship, though, that’s made me the luckiest girl in the world. They’re family to me. I’d have no life without them.

I still remember sneaking out on our dorm room the night of freshman move-in—which was when I met them. We were drunker than we ought to have been. Penelope named us the sweeties, on account of the dorm suite we’d been assigned to. Estella shouted it across the DC night sky. Did you hear that, people? We’re the sweeties! Addie, always the coolest (and the soberest), told Estella to hush up before we woke the RA. Everyone always does what Addie says.

Don’t tell anyone, but I love Addie best.

Today, weather forecasters have called for a huge snowstorm. The idea of snow makes me a little nervous. I’m a southern girl from the Georgia coast, where we don’t do snow. Will the city close down? Can the four of us hunker down and make smores in the fireplace? Will Estella really make us throw a snow party?

Since the storm’s not expected to start until afternoon, I make a huge pot of coffee for the girlies before getting dressed for work. I search the fridge for food I didn’t buy—we live communally, that’s another Addie Rule—and find a half bagel at the back of the freezer I poach, knowing Estella won’t mind.

I get dressed for work at my starter job in a PR firm on the Georgetown waterfront. I’m a dirt digger, a researcher looking for bad stuff on our client’s political opponents—not a great job, and really long hours, but it pays okay, and did I mention the ungodly-high rent for my dusty room in the attic turret? I dress in a cute sweater and jeans Estella gave me—she’s the fashionista, also the most generous person I know—before I slide on my parka and step into the boots. That’s when Addie comes in from her daily five-mile run.

Today she’s got bruises.

WATCH US FALL
Genre: Psychological Thriller
Release: December 2025
Format: Print, Digital, Audio
Purchase Link

Lucy and her three best friends share a glamorous but decaying house in the heart of Georgetown. They call themselves “the Sweeties” and live an idyllic post-grad lifestyle complete with exciting jobs, dramatic love lives, and, most importantly, each other.

But when Addie, the group’s queen bee, discovers that her ex-boyfriend Josh has gone missing, the Sweeties’ worlds are turned upside down. In the days leading up to his disappearance, Josh, a star investigative journalist from a prominent political family, was behaving erratically—and Lucy is determined to find out why. All four friends upend their lives to search for him, but detectives begin to suspect that the Sweeties might know more than they’re letting on.

As the investigation unfolds, Lucy’s obsession with the case reaches a boiling point, and with it, her own troubling secrets begin bubbling to the surface of her carefully curated life. A thrilling account of the lies and delusions that lurk beneath cloistered groups of female friends and the sinister realities of celebrity,

Watch Us Fall is a gripping mystery and an examination of the things we tell ourselves when we can’t face the truth.

About the author
Christina Kovac is the author of Watch Us Fall and The Cutaway. She worked for seventeen years managing Washington, DC, newsrooms and producing crime and political stories in the District. Her career as a television journalist began with Fox Five’s Ten O’Clock News, and after that, the ABC affiliate in Washington and then at NBC news. She lives with her family outside of Washington, DC.