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Overview
From the author of Stolen Things comes a twisty thriller that asks how tightly we are bound to our pasts, how much we can trust those around us, and how far a mother will go to protect her child.
Jillian Marsh is a survivor. She escaped her toxic upbringing at the hands of her religious zealot mother as a teenager, and after hitting rock bottom due to alcoholism in her twenties, she not only got sober, she built a successful marriage and medical career, even if she wasn’t able to make amends for all the mistakes she made during her drinking days. But nearly a decade later, things are once again going downhill for Jillian. Her wife, Rochelle, has left her while Jillian is pregnant with Rochelle’s biological child, and she feels constantly unsettled in her now-empty house—items missing from their usual place, burning candles she can’t remember lighting, the screen from her bedroom window removed. Even her mommies-to-be group isn’t the solace it once was. Bree, Camille, Maggie, and Jillian vowed to not only support one another in motherhood but in their sobriety, careers, and maintaining their independence after their babies are born . . . a sisterhood that begins to unravel when the secrets between the women come unwillingly to light.
As things in Jillian’s home begin to escalate, she’s forced to ask herself: Is one of her supposed friends not as trustworthy as she seems? Could Rochelle be gaslighting her in order to claim full custody of their daughter? Or, worst of all—is Jillian turning into her own mother, and imagining all of it in some sort of subconscious sabotage against her unborn child?
When the missing items turn into unambiguous threats, and as the circle of those she can trust continues to dwindle, Jillian knows only one thing for sure: she will do anything to protect her baby.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780593183496 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 05/11/2021 |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Sales rank: | 1,111,810 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Prologue
The room I woke up in smelled sweet and rich, like an expensive candle that had burned too long in a small space. The sheet I was lying on was covered with orange California poppies.
But I didn’t own poppy sheets.
This wasn’t my room. This wasn’t my bed.
Through blurry eyes, I saw aggressively yellow walls. A rocking chair sat on an orange rug. A changing table stood on the far side of the room, and a short shelf displayed a line of stuffed animals.
My head pounded, my tongue was thick and fuzzy in my dry mouth, and I was freezing. There was no sheet over me, and I was only wearing an oversized red tank top and a black skirt that had risen to rest underneath my massively pregnant belly.
They weren’t my clothes.
Sucking in a breath, I pressed my elbows against my sides, my hands cradling my stomach. I tried to remember.
But instead of a memory of the night before, I just had flashes. A terrifying lullaby. A doll. Fear coiled in my torso, too close to the baby. Something was wrong in my home, really wrong. They had to finally believe me.
How had I gotten to wherever this was?
I tried to push myself up into a seated position so I could clear my head, but my leg was caught. Tethered, somehow. I tried to shake it loose.
There was a cuff around my left ankle.
The shackle was made of leather and attached to a ring of steel. A chain ran from the ring to the foot of the wooden bed frame, where it appeared to be padlocked. The wooden rails of the bed frame were thick, and the padlock was heavy-duty. I tugged on the chain with my arms, but it was real. It held.
I laughed in shocked surprise, although if this was a game, I hated it. “Hello?” My voice caught in the dry terror that coated my throat. What the hell was going on?
Back to last night. Remember. I’d been at home—hadn’t I? I couldn’t quite recall what I’d been afraid of. Even though it had been years since I’d had a drink, I felt like I was coming out of a blackout—memory fragments lit up in my brain but didn’t want to slide together. A car chase, pausing in front of Whole Foods, then…what?
I opened my mouth to call out again, but then closed it. Was it even safe to yell for help?
No. I was shackled to a bed. I was obviously not safe.
And I was so thirsty.
I swiveled my head to the right and saw a bottle of water on the nightstand. It was within reach, and I started to lunge for it, but the object sitting next to it froze my hand in place and my heart in my chest.
The doll.
It was the same one I’d found in the box on my doorstep, the one made of rough linen and constructed to look like me, with wavy brown yarn for hair and blue eyes drawn on in pen. But instead of the round stomach that it had also shared with me, the doll’s belly had been ripped off, leaving only red batting trailing to her linen knees.
My legs started shaking, and my eyelids slammed shut.
Remember. You have to remember.
Chapter One
One Month Earlier
“Just five more pushes, Stella.” I pressed the blue towel in my left hand against her skin, and my right hand cupped the soft plum dome of the baby’s head as she crowned. I caught Lisa’s eye over her mask. She had the isolette cart ready—the one that would whisk the new wiggly human to NICU if we needed to start up the lungs or restart the heart the size of a walnut.
I wasn’t worried, though. The fetal monitor had been good this whole time. Stella was over six feet tall with a pelvis you could drive a Mack truck through. If we finished this right, she wouldn’t even need stitches. Baby was fighting me, a great sign. My neck gave a sharp twinge—my own 36-weeks-pregnant shape had made all my normal movements feel different, and my muscles protested the physicality of my job.
Stella gave the last push with an elongated grunt (but no shouting—she hadn’t even sworn once). Then the baby’s head was out, and a second later, the rest of her slipped free.
All the parts were in the right place. “Here she is, Mama.” I gave the infant a quick rubdown and placed her skin to skin on Stella’s belly. I continued to dry and stimulate, while Lisa suctioned the baby’s mouth and then her nose. The little one gave a startled squall in the pitch of new kitten, my favorite sound in the whole world.
“You hear that?” My voice was low, so only Stella could hear. “That’s the sound of your baby saying she loves you for the very first time.”
Stella met my eyes for a split second, and in her gaze was that deliciously stunned look that never failed to give me goosebumps. Then I disappeared in her view, as did her husband, a guy named Steve who I couldn’t pick out of a lineup of identically bland white men. For a few moments, no one else existed except her new little girl. The rest of us were mere shadows for a few more moments. Soon Stella would refocus from her baby and look up at Steve, and in that moment, he’d become Dad, but not until after Stella had morphed from pregnant to mother.
People always thought the miracle of birth was about what happened between the mother’s legs, but honestly, the actual process of giving birth was usually the least of it—the body would do what the body did. Even with modern drugs and birthing pools and hospital tools, the body was the master. If the women didn’t need medical intervention, they had their babies in exactly the same way they’d have them laboring alone in a hut on a mountainside. When a woman turned into a mother—that was the real miracle. I watched Stella’s face go from red to light pink, watched the tears fill her eyes (I’d almost pegged her as non-crier, something we rarely see).
And then, it happened: the fierceness swamped her. I didn’t see it happen in all new mothers. Some were too drugged, and some just didn’t have it yet. Some wouldn’t get it for months, years, or sometimes ever. But Stella got it. A muscle jumped in her cheek as she bent her head to smell the baby, and I could almost hear her teeth grit with determination to keep this child safe. Steve looked like the kind of guy who would give her a “push” gift, a necklace or a bigger diamond ring. What he should give her was an enemy nation to conquer. The fierceness had turned her into a warrior.
By then, Lisa—one of the best nurse-midwives I worked with—was showing Stella how to tickle the infant’s lower lip with her nipple so her mouth would open for a good latch. I gave a small wave and said, “I’ll check on you both later,” but no one saw me go. That was the way I liked it. Some of my colleagues got possessive of the babies and their mothers. I didn’t think of them as mine. I was pit crew, that’s all. Okay, yeah, I was really great pit crew but still just a grease monkey. I was the glass you broke in case of emergency.
And I was also an hour past getting off my twenty-four-hour shift. I was exhausted and being this monumentally pregnant made everything more difficult. I’d have to hurry to make it home, start the Instant Pot, and still get to my meeting on time.
I took a quick shower and changed into my street clothes in the locker room. My Audi slipped me out of the parking garage straight into traffic, which wasn’t as bad as it could have been for early evening. I chanced taking Abbot Kinney Boulevard right through the heart of Venice’s shopping district. When we’d moved here six years ago, Venice was already upscale, belying its hippie reputation, but it had gotten even more bougie in the last couple of years. Blue Bottle Coffee ($6 latte) vied with Blue Star Donuts ($4 mimosa donuts) across the street. As usual, there was a line outside of Salt and Straw Ice Cream. Rochelle loved their lavender-bourbon flavor, but I was always going to be more of a Ben’n’Jerry’s Americone Dream kind of girl.
I turned up NPR, as if Terry Gross could distract me from thinking about Rochelle’s flavor preference. It didn’t matter anymore what Rochelle loved. I had to start remembering that at some point.
Five minutes later, I was home. In the driveway, I held up my camera to take a picture. Sunset wasn’t for another hour or so, but the sky’s color was already fading from bright blue to watercolor slate. I had a million of these shots—the Underwood’s house across the street, that piece of the telephone pole. Of course, I preferred pictures of cloud-streaked sunsets, but since the majority SoCal days were cloudless, I’d gotten the hang of catching transparent sky colors with my camera. In another life, maybe I’d been a painter. The sky and the myriad colors that floated through them—grays, oranges, even greens some nights—made me ache to catch them somehow, even if my phone was the only way to do it. I couldn’t grab my sky picture every night. Life and work got in the way, often, so I hoarded extra pictures for the nights I couldn’t actually look up.
I went back though the garage, sending the door rumbling down after me. I unlocked the inner house door, the alarm beeping its warning. I disarmed it and set it back on Stay, congratulating myself for remembering to set it.
It used to be that when I stepped inside, I’d call out for Rochelle. She’d greet me with a kiss, already unpacking takeout and saving all the Hoisin sauce packets for me.
But she wasn’t here anymore.
Chapter Two
It wasn’t that she was gone-gone. Rochelle wasn’t dead, although sometimes when I was swimming around in my self-pity pool I wondered if that might actually be easier to recover from. No, she was just across town, living in Echo Park with her hot girlfriend, the one she’d left me for when I was four months pregnant with her biological child. Another four months later, I was only starting to get used to the idea of living alone.
Funny, it used to be that when Rochelle had late nights out with clients, I’d be overjoyed to have a night to myself. I would have dropped my bag on the kitchen table and gone straight to the kitchen to preheat the oven to cook one of the pepperoni pizzas she didn’t like that I always kept in the freezer. On those nights, if I wasn’t paged back to work, I cooked the pizza with an extra-crispy crust (Rochelle liked a floppy crust but I’d loved her anyway) and put on my softest, ugliest clothes. I’d tug on the huge T-shirt that I’d gotten at a novelty store way back in the day, even before I’d gotten sober—it was a big man’s size, and it was covered with cats shooting lasers out their eyes while fireworks went off all around them. It was the opposite of sexy bedroom wear, but laser cat T-shirt was my comfort T-shirt. The way it trapped me in its twisted folds as I slept should have given me nightmares, but instead, it comforted me. It reminded me of the long nightgowns I’d worn growing up. I hadn’t been the only girl in Utah who wore a neck-to-toe flannel home-sewn nightgown to bed, and I’d loved the weight of it as I’d gotten into bed. Waking up twisted tightly inside it hadn’t felt like being trapped, it felt like being held. My laser-cat T-shirt comforted me the same way. Only now, my bulging belly actually filled it.
Bu a night alone wasn’t a rare freedom anymore. It wasn’t a cause for excitement. It was just my life. The quiet rooms echoed hollowly as I walked through them by myself. I’d always thought of our house as one of those welcoming, cheerful homes. It was empty and cold now.
Tonight it felt actually cold. I checked the thermostat—I didn’t remember setting the AC to 65. It had been a warm day, and it must have come on automatically even though I tried to remember to turn it off when I went to work. Yet another thing I must have forgotten to do, like picking up cat litter for Fred, or paying the car insurance. I reset the thermostat to let the house warm up a bit.
Then I wandered into the kitchen, patting the top of my belly. “No pizza tonight, huh, V?” I was trying hard to keep myself fed with actual food that had recognizable ingredients, not frozen pizzas or Hot Pockets. I threw three frozen chicken breasts into the Instant Pot with a cup of green tomatillo salsa. By the time I got home from the meeting, I’d have shreddable comfort food. This baby was made of tacos loaded with cabbage and crema and cheese and avocado. I figured there were worse things to be made of.
I glanced at the clock on the wall. I had just enough time to write a few lines in the baby journal before I got back in the car. In a clearly inadequate practice run of sharing custody, I was trying to write in it every day when it was my week to have it.
I’d been keeping the book in the nursery, writing in it while sitting in the rocker that I would nurse the baby in.
But the journal wasn’t on the shelf…