by Ruth Ware
“But the bombs?” I kept asking. “I remember seeing them on the television. The bombs and the war and the children crying in the rubble. They were real, weren’t they? Father didn’t make those up.”
“They were real,” Mother said. “But they weren’t here. The war was far overseas, in a place called Syria and another called Iraq. Do you remember?”
I shook my head. I had never heard of Syria.
“And the bombs in the capital? And the schools closing?”
The bombs had been real, Mother said. But they weren’t a war. Just something called terrorists. And the schools had only ever closed for the summer holidays, as they always did. Our house—the house that Father had told me was a bombed-out shell—our house was still standing. Our school had gone back in September, with all my friends but not me.
The world had carried on. Without us.
Terrorists. I tried the word out on my tongue after Mother had gone, to check up on Jacob, who was having surgery for a broken arm. When I asked Cain later what it meant, he said people who disagreed with the government. People who used bombs and guns to get what they wanted.
He did not say people like Father. But I knew what he thought.
Because Cain had always suspected the truth. All those years, working the cows, plowing the land. Cain had known that something in Father’s story did not add up. He was old enough to remember life on the mainland more clearly, old enough to see holes in some of the stories of bombs and soldiers on the street and civil unrest. But he was still a child. And he was still Father’s son. And so he put his head down, and he accepted what he was told.
But when Father began to build the wall, Cain started to become more and more worried. And as the weeks wore on and the chores were left undone and the crops went unharvested, Cain began to believe that Father did not intend to survive the winter.
And so he began to look for clues.
There were so many things when he began to question Father’s version of events. The glow from the mainland that Father said was from the bombings and fires. If that were so, why did we never hear the sound of the bombs? And why was the glow so steady? Shouldn’t a fire wax and wane? And the publication dates on the comic books Father said he had looted from the burned-out stores—they were still being printed five years after we had fled.
But the last straw, the thing that made Cain take the battered boat and flee for the mainland, came from the most unlikely place of all.
May’s snowflake.
She had pinned it on his wall months before, cut out of a newspaper Father had been using to clean the shotgun.
Cain had taken it down, and he’d seen there was a date on it. A date just two days before Father holed the boat and told us that life on the mainland was destroyed beyond repair.
May had snipped a dozen holes into the articles, but Cain could still read between the lines—and the stories were ordinary, commonplace ones. A school fair and a fancy-dress competition. An irritated letter about the town council’s policy on pothole repair. An advertisement for a Disney cruise.
He could have shown the snowflake to Father. He could have demanded an explanation. But he knew what Father would say. Fake news. Media propaganda. They’re blinding you to the truth, boy.
And Cain was done with Father’s truth.
It took a long time for Jacob’s arm to heal. I had been lucky—a clean shot to the upper arm, designed to incapacitate. But Jacob had been shot in the shoulder. The bone shattered, and he might never regain full use of his arm.
It took our shattered hearts even longer to heal. How do you relearn everything you thought was the truth? How do you make your life again? When they talked of high schools and exams and jobs, I wanted to laugh. The school I remembered was one where the alphabet was hung in bright colors around the walls, and the story-time bear was a large, friendly presence in the corner by the show-and-tell table—impossibly far from the sprawling gray buildings full of more people than I had ever imagined existed.
After that first morning, May did not sing again, until I began to think that perhaps I had imagined that small, high voice singing “Mamma mia, hello again” beside my hospital bed. She grew thin and pale and did not want to come out of her room or visit any of the day centers Mother had found for her. She only lay on her bed, staring at the wall, stroking her pillow the way she had once stroked Woof.
At last Mother bullied her into the car and they drove off together, May huddled and withdrawn in the back seat. Mother came back alone, looking drained, and said that May had agreed to stay for a “trial” day.
I went with her to pick May up. Not because I wanted to, but because Mother looked so sad and defeated that I wanted to make her happy.
We opened the door to the center, and Mother signed us in, and we walked down the corridor to the peach room, where May was supposed to be, and we opened the door.
And there she was, sitting on the floor, head down, surrounded by scraps of paper. They were playing ABBA, and some of the other students at the center were in the middle, dancing and smiling. May wasn’t dancing. But as I drew closer, I saw that she was singing—her own words. And she looked up at me with shining eyes and held out a string of paper dolls longer and more beautiful than any she had ever made.
“The singer makes them all,” she sang along to the beautiful rising music, and her face was happier than I could remember as she spread the dolls out in a great span from arm to arm, more dolls than she had ever seen, ever dreamed of.
There were tears in Mother’s eyes as she picked up an armful of discarded scraps and scattered them in the air, over May’s head, the white fragments raining down like snowflakes all around, while May held up her arms and laughed and laughed and laughed, and the music played on, while all around, the children danced.
AVAILABLE FALL 2020 WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD
“Diabolically clever.” —Riley Sager, author of Final Girls
Getting snowed in at an exclusive ski chalet high in the pristine French Alps doesn’t sound like the worst problem in the world. Especially when there’s a breathtaking vista, a cozy fire, an incredible chef, and company to keep you warm. Unless that company happens to be eight coworkers . . . each with something to gain, something to lose, and something to hide.
In ONE BY ONE, Ware brings her signature skillful, twist-filled storytelling to an ultramodern locked-door thriller about an ill-fated corporate retreat where survival soon trumps synergy.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2019 Gemma Day
Ruth Ware is the author of number one New York Times bestseller The Woman in Cabin 10 and, most recently, the New York Times bestsellers The Turn of the Key, The Death of Mrs. Westaway, and The Lying Game. Published in more than forty countries worldwide, Ware lives in the UK near Brighton with her family.