Welcome to “First Chapters,” Cosmo’s column where we shine a spotlight on newer authors who you are definitely going to be obsessed with. And what better way for you to get to know them and their books than with the first chapter of their new release. This round, we’re highlighting Sarah Domet’s Everything Lost Returns, a magical new novel that introduces us to two women as they discover a deeper connection to each other as Halley’s Comet blurs time. Here’s some more info from Flatiron Books:

The POIGNANT, UTTERLY ORIGINAL story of two women separated across time but united by the arrival of Halley's comet, as blazing and as daring as their stories

“[A] PAGE-TURNER." —The Millions
"Beautiful, engrossing, and REVELATORY." —Nina de Gramont, NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author
“A DAZZLING, magical novel that entrances with every page.” —Jason Mott, NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author

1986. The Earthshine Soap Company has given Nona Dixon everything, from making her the brand’s first Earthshine Girl to launching her acting career. It also threatens to be the very thing that causes her to unravel when a group of Jane Does file a class action lawsuit accusing the company of putting harmful ingredients into their products. When Nona begins investigating Bertie Tuttle, the company’s third-generation owner, she uncovers a complicated history involving her benefactor and a mysterious woman named Opal Doucet.

1910. Seventy-six years earlier, Opal Doucet, a rural doctor’s wife, is pregnant, on the run, and desperate to get to Paris and to the charismatic spiritualist who supposedly communed with her first love. To save money, Opal goes to work in the Earthshine Soap factory as an Earthshine Girl where she uses her knowledge of medicine, and the spiritualist’s teachings, to prescribe cures to the women who’ve come down with mystery ailments. As she and Bertie Tuttle secretly partner in a labor strike intended to improve the working conditions at the factory, Opal must decide the cost of her own freedom.

Gorgeously written and intricately constructed, Everything Lost Returns is a story of desire and friendship, guilt and redemption, and the power we have, in our own small way, to change the course of history.

And now we’re giving you the chance to meet the iconic Earthshine Girl herself in a special excerpt below! Just make sure to pre-order Everything Lost Returns so you can also meet Opal and also check out some of Sarah’s other work as well!

An Excerpt From Everything Lost Returns
By Sarah Domet

I am dead.

The director scrutinizes the lighting, the angle, me, there in the

coffin. His head floats above me; his eyebrows cinch. My ruffled collar itches my chin, but I must remain still, for stillness is an actor’s greatest tool.

I am never really dead.

I always recall the characters I’ve played as though I’m still playing them. Embodying them, my old acting teacher at the conservatory would say. Channeling their essence. She used to have us sit at a table with our eyes closed, our palms stretched wide. Listen for a pulse, a voice inside you, she’d say. Your body is no longer your body. Your mind is no longer your mind. Now say it . . . More than a decade and a half later, in that plywood coffin, I repeated those words to myself. I am not me. I am not me.

It was early January 1986, around the time of the comet, that nine-mile ball of light that appears every seventy-six years and bears the name of the astronomer who predicted it. Halley’s Comet. Already the comet was everywhere: on ball caps and T-shirts, on magazine covers and beer ads and souvenir spoons. Each night, the local meteorologist tracked the comet’s progress toward perihelion—February 9—when it’d be closest to Earth, visible to the naked eye.

There, in that box beneath the dirt—though really on the sound-stage—I said it: I am not me. I am Stella. My body elongated and relaxed. My skin stretched. My legs became her legs. Her hands were my hands. I was full of grit, literally and metaphorically. I manifested

strength on-screen.

I became Stella. I was in a box. The box was in the ground. The ground was in Port Middleton, the fictional setting of Stars and Shadows, the fifth-ranked soap opera in the nation, though the most popular in the regional market because it was filmed in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the studio attached to the Earthshine Soap Factory, the show’s only sponsor.

Elliot yelled, “Roll sound,” then I heard the click of the clapper board by the production assistant, some young intern with no panty line. I couldn’t see much from where I was lying, only the bobbled heads of the makeup girl and the wardrobe assistant, the boom mic hanging above me. My stomach growled, and this felt like a betrayal because I’d eaten Dexatrim for breakfast.

I focused my mind again. I was Stella Shadow, the niece of Celeste Shadow, the wealthiest woman in Port Middleton. I’d contracted a disease so rare that only two doctors in the world had ever heard of it, and luckily one of them practiced at Port Middleton Memorial.

My body felt heavy. I’m buried alive, I told myself. At the conservatory, my acting coach taught me to feel my impact points. She taught me to follow the breath through my body, to extend it out of the top of my head like a whale spouting water. I began to sense the walls around me, the way my toes and arms and head grazed the wood. The dome lamp hung over me, and the heat dampened my skin, but I imagined it’d be cool beneath the soil. I imagined earthworms wriggling outside the box, the kind Wyatt would tell me increased soil aeration and nutrient cycling. He’d once bought me a bag of worms when I’d planted a garden because that’s what our marriage looked like then: possibility.

“Action,” said Elliot. The camera rolled. The bulb near the viewfinder blinked red three times, then became a beady eye.

Oh, I’d died before: a boat explosion, a safari disaster, an airplane crash over the mysterious island of Notelddim Trop, which is just Port Middleton spelled backward. But I always came back. The credits list me as a recurring guest star—and I loved seeing that word beside my name, star, even if I wasn’t technically part of the main cast.

Above me, I could hear Celeste Shadow beside my grave weeping.

“If only I’d been in time,” Celeste said. She’d been in the Far East, searching for the other doctor who had the cure for the rare disease that claimed me. “I arrived with that vial just as you expired,” she wailed.

I heard my cue, then I felt it: the weight of expectation, the shift of attention in my direction. So much of acting is stillness and energy combined—even when you’re not playing dead. My eyes were closed but they fluttered, then opened, and then fill lights blinded me, like I was looking directly at the sun. The brightness distracted me. I began thinking about endings, about Wyatt, about how the last time I’d seen him everything was confusing again. Wyatt kissed me goodbye and said, You’re a hard habit to break, which was just a lyric from a Chicago song, so it didn’t mean anything, really. But it made me sad because, first, it was a breakup song, and, second, I wasn’t a habit: I was still, technically, his wife.

And that’s when I heard it first, there in that coffin. I mistook it for a horn in the distance, or a barge passing on the Ohio River nearby. The noise was staticky, faraway and close at once: just a single note, repeating.

Waaaa. Waaaa.

“Line,” I said.

“Can you hear me? Can you hear me, Aunt Celeste? You are in time. I’m still alive,” read the production assistant. The way she spoke told me she had secret ambitions.

“Cut, cut,” Elliot yelled. A hand reached down for me, and I allowed myself to be pulled up. “Ten-minute break, everyone,” he said, then: “For christsakes, Nona, what’s your problem?”

“Sorry, Elliot,” I said. I could no longer make out that strange noise. “Just give me a minute.” Getting out of the coffin was like getting out of a canoe; there was no easy way. I wore heels for authenticity, even though the script called for only close-ups of my fists pounding the box.

“I know, I know,” he said. Elliot was short, so I slouched to make myself smaller.

“I’m distracted is all.”

“Me, too, Nona, but Christ. I’m doing my job—at least while I have one, which may not be long, if you’ve been keeping up with the news. Did you see today’s paper? Another one.”

He was talking about the latest article in the Cincinnati Inquisitor. Last month, four Jane Does had come forward with a lawsuit, claiming Earthshine Soap contained addictive chemicals of some sort, psychoactive ingredients that caused all sorts of side effects. Since then, production schedules had been all over the place; the studio was needed to shoot new commercials for the latest PR campaign. Now, according to this morning’s paper, a fifth woman had been added to

the lawsuit.

“Crazy,” I said. “Soap crossing the blood-brain barrier. Who’d ever come up with that?” Standing there on set, my toes squeezed into too-narrow shoes, I’ll admit: I didn’t believe those Jane Does. I hadn’t considered I could be one, too.

“I’m already getting heat. Threats of a boycott. Worse. We can’t drop our only sponsor. We’d be done.”

“Bored housewives would never give up Port Middleton,” I said.

“Someone egged my car this morning. Those women are batshit.”

“Was it one of them? A Jane Doe?” I asked.

“No. I don’t know—protesters of some sort. A line of them as I drove in this morning. Didn’t you see them?”

I shook my head.

He leaned against the foam gravestone bearing Stella’s name but thought better of it. “I bet Bertie Tuttle’s gone ballistic. That’s one woman you don’t want to piss off, even if she is a hundred.”

“Ninety-nine,” I said.

“Look,” he said. “This must be extra difficult for you, you know, because . . . well, because of your involvement.”

“I’ve got nothing to do with the lawsuit,” I said.

“Well, you know. Because you’re close with the Tuttles, with Halley, all that. And because your face is on the soap.”

“I was a kid. I doubt anybody even remembers it’s me.” I sat down on the bench next to Stella’s grave, still warm from Celeste. “Orthodontics and hair dye.”

Even as I said the words, I knew it was a lie. Sure, I played Stella, but I was better known as the Earthshine Girl, the original Earthshine Girl, famous face of the soap. At age seven, I’d been discovered, singing at Music Hall with my school choir in the May Festival. Shortly thereafter, Bertie Tuttle herself offered me the part. It wasn’t my acting that made me famous. It was the soap. It was because I’d been in People magazine. “It’s the Earthshine Girl!” strangers would shout from their cars, even years later, even after orthodontics and hair dye. Occasionally someone would ask for a photo or an autograph.

“Look, Nona,” Elliot said, changing the subject. “Last week we had to do three takes during the funeral scene. And forgetting lines? I just don’t want to see you written off again.”

“I’m always written off, Elliot. That’s the whole point of bringing me back.”

“So soon. You know what I mean. I’ve been talking to the writers about making you a series regular,” he said. “They’re considering pitching it to the execs.”

“Do I get a love interest?” Stella never had a romance, no desires of her own, no storyline written just for her character. Writers easily killed her off because nobody besides Celeste ever really cared she was gone.

“This isn’t exactly Love Connection. I . . . I know you’re dealing with some, uh, personal stuff. You and Wyatt.”

“You know about that?” We hadn’t used the word divorce. Not yet. A month apart—some time to think—had turned into three. I stared down at my shoes, Edwardian oxfords that reminded me of what Virginia Woolf might have worn when she walked into that river with rocks in her pockets.

“Everyone sort of knows, yeah.”

“Did Halley tell you?” I asked.

“She just wanted to help. I want to help. We’re like family.”

“Does Stella live this time?” I only ever received the script a week in advance, at the cold reads, to ensure the storyline didn’t get out to the gossip rags, though Stars and Shadows may have benefited from that kind of publicity.

“You know I can’t tell you that.” Elliot sat beside me on the bench.

“I thought we were family.”

“Show family.”

“I need this job, Elliot.”

“It’s not up to me. I’ve always said I think you have star potential.”

“Potential. That’s what we called the girls who made chorus. At the conservatory, I was always the lead,” I said. He put his arm around me, and I rested my head on his shoulder. “I was good. I was better than good.”

“Word of advice?” he said. His breath smelled like the Fritos and Skyline Chili dip someone left in the green room. “This isn’t the conservatory anymore. This is real life.”

Excerpted from EVERYTHING LOST RETURNS by Sarah Domet. Copyright © 2026 by Sarah Domet. Reprinted with permission from Flatiron Books. All rights reserved.

Everything Lost Returns, by Sarah Domet will be released on February 17, 2026 from Flatiron Books. To preorder the book, click on the retailer of your choice:

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