In six compassionate and quietly powerful stories, Claire Frieze explores lives where security is an illusion and everything can change in a single moment.

In the title story, if…, a woman finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time, with consequences that ripple far beyond that moment.

 

Another story blurs the boundary between nightmare and reality, leaving both protagonist and reader uncertain where safety lies.

Elsewhere, a brief act of resistance challenges years of abuse; a middle-class family’s financial collapse forces them to reassess their values; a bus journey shifts an unhappy woman’s understanding of her own life; and in a bleak post-apocalyptic society, a new order proves no kinder than the world it replaced.