Livvy’s lying on her mat on the floor, gazing at the back of the sofa. I kick off my shoes, pull her onto my lap. Kiss her four times on the soft, wide moon of her forehead—four fast kisses to make her laugh.

She does. She squeaks.

… I hold her away from me, hold her up under her sweet fat arms, and then zoom her back for another four kisses. Up and in, up and back. She does her cartoon giggle.

One aspect of the writing, however, creates a problem that distances the reader greatly from the other people in this story. She writes without using quotation marks, presenting even extended conversations as though they were diary entries:

The thing about Mick is, he thinks it’s clever not to rise to things.

I’m not trying to hide anything from you—

That’s what I tell him, but he shrugs.

I know, Tess. I don’t think you are. It still doesn’t mean I need to know.

It’s your life, he says when I don’t reply to this. Your life, your time.

No, I say as carefully as I can. Don’t you see how maddening it is when you say that? It’s not. It’s our time.

He laughs.

A little of this goes a long way. It’s more than a stylistic trick; it’s a killer. It puts everything in Tess’s voice, with the result that none of the other characters comes even remotely alive. The three men Tess is involved with—her husband, Lennie’s widower Alex, and the empathetic policeman Lacey—are indistinguishable, and since she’s apparently falling out of love with one of them while falling in love with another (and comes close to sleeping with all three) it's a severe limitation for these characters to be undeveloped. Without some insight into the other principal players, Tess’s grief-stricken ruminations become hermetic, self-referential, and ultimately boring.
    When that ominous "something might happen" happens again, late in the book, it is unexpected, tragic, and utterly meaningless--one more random act in a ruthlessly cruel world. This time, however, it’s not a murder but an accident, an accident to which Tess has possibly contributed by taking her eye off the ball "for that split second—which is all it takes to lose just about everything you care about."
    That's how the book leaves Tess, grappling not only with grief but with the realization that sorrows do indeed come not single spies but in battalion. There is no consoling coda, no earnest, uplifting message about getting on with one’s life, no practical resolve to keep it together for the sake of the children. Something Might Happen is a literate and elegiac rendering of the less elegant "shit happens," but the conclusion is equally bleak. The book ends as Tess contemplates the lonely marshes around her village:

And then, despite the crackle of insects in the gorse, the cry of the bittern, the brown gleam of the saltings, the eerie, mauve light that creeps in just before rain, you shiver. Because—smelling the coltsfoot coming off the dunes, feeling the sharp breeze that lifts your hair—you sense the truth. That there’s no one at all out there to save you, should something happen.
                                                                                                                                                           -  Kendal Dodge Butler