by Roz Nay
RUTH
THREE WEEKS LATER
When they give Will back to me, it’s like being handed my own heartbeat. I can’t stop crying. But I feel more alive than I’ve felt in years. In the weeks that follow, we walk together through the streets of Moses River, his plum little body cocooned in a warm wrap against me. It’s the end of October. The weather is clinging to a golden soulfulness, everything deepening, mellowing.
Most days we stop in at the Lovin’ Oven bakery. Will’s popular there, and the owner seems to like me. My baker’s gone mountain biking again, she often tells me in a flurry of flour. When are you going to come work for me? I can’t tell if she’s joking. Will hears the little bell over the door of the bakery, blinkss up at the direction of it with his soft brown eyes as we go in. It’s an easy place to go with him when I’m sleep-deprived—not that I mind, not that I’d change anything. Other women at the playgroups complain all the time about having to get up twice a night. I understand it, I even join in and laugh, but I don’t tell them how lucky they are, how the loss of sleep is a blessing, how nearly I was robbed of it all. At 3:00 a.m. with Will, the light between us is spectered and silver, our own precious metal. Here I am, I think as I feed him, a mother in the world. Beaten about but doing okay now.
Today when I enter the Lovin’ Oven, Sully’s there at a table by himself, reading a dog-eared novel, sipping black coffee from his Gravy mug. I fumble a little with my change. I don’t know if he’ll want to talk to me, but when I turn, he’s closing his book. He’s seen me. Of course he has.
“Hi.” I head over and stand next to his table. His hair’s an inch longer than when I last saw him, four weeks ago, when he helped me load my things into Chase’s car. It makes him look scruffier. “Long time no see.”
He nods. “How have you been, Ruth? You look well. Want to join me for a minute?”
I ease slowly onto the bench, turning so that Will also fits in. Sully tilts his head to take in Will’s face, smiles a little.
“What’s your book about?” I ask, because I don’t know what else to say. We’ve lived through each other’s worst days, witnessed each other’s heartbreaks. It was too heavy to suddenly be light.
“It’s about a stranger who comes to town.” His smile is bittersweet.
“Oh,” I say. And then: “Are you doing okay?”
“Yeah, I’m okay,” he says. “So you’re sticking around? Where are you living?”
“In one of the town houses near the bridge and the park. It’s a short walk from Chase’s loft.” I pause. “It’s not mine or anything. Morris found it for me—the government helps me pay rent.”
“Morris is probably terrified you’ll go to the press,” Sully says. “You could, you know.”
I shake my head. It’s something I’ve been wondering about. It’s on my mind. But right now, I have Will to take care of. I have to take care of him first.
Sully nods, as if he’s heard my entire thought pattern. “So the town house is nice?”
“Chase helped me choose linens. They’re far too fancy for me.”
“That’s good,” Sully says. “You deserve some nice things.”
I blush, although I’m not sure why. “Chase helped me move in, too. The house is little but clean, new, simple. I can’t believe I have the key.”
“There you go,” Sully says, sad eyes smiling. “Not everything’s a battle anymore.”
We both sip our coffee while I wonder if there’s anyone in his life who’ll give him a hug. Chase has become my person. When he’s in town, he hangs out for long afternoons with Will on his lap and sports on the television. Just like old times. Almost.
“And have you—” Sully begins, but he’s distracted by someone behind me. I turn to see a woman with a child—a little boy with socks on but no shoes, something hard and yellow caked on the front of his shirt. The woman is thin, way too thin, and the smell of nicotine wafts from the fabric of her coat.
“Evelyn Floyd,” Sully whispers, and I try not to stare—this stranger who was pivotal to me getting my son back. She looks tragically familiar. I’ve known women like her all my life, the ragged strays, the ones who’ve drunk more in their life than they’ve eaten.
“Buster,” she’s saying, running after him with his shoes. “Put these on. You’re in public, you have to behave.” She grabs him and kneels, helping him with his laces. “Right. One, two, buckle my shoe. Now, are you having a cookie or a muffin?” They wander to the far end of the bakery where the display cases are.
I turn back to Sully, hold Will a little tighter. “She’s doing her best,” I say.
He nods.
“I wanted to thank you,” I say after a moment, “for everything you did. I couldn’t have gotten Will back without you.”
He rotates his coffee mug an inch. “It’s okay. Once in a while, good wins out in the end.”
I nibble at my scone and say nothing.
“Have you seen Alex at all?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “She’s awaiting trial. I don’t think I can see her.” He could. He means he doesn’t want to.
“That’s okay,” I say. “I don’t she’d be thrilled to see either of us.” I don’t know why I feel compelled to visit Alex, but I do. Perhaps I’m still trying to prove my worth, which is silly, I know, since I’m the one escaping with my freedom, while she’s in all kinds of trouble. It’s not only the drugs, now—there are other charges being laid against her involving children, harm, and fraud—when I saw Morris to get the forms for my housing, he told me everyone’s coming out of the woodwork. The case against my sister is growing each day. He said it’s a shit show. But even after everything Alex has done, it’s not what I want for her.
“You don’t want to see her, do you?” Sully looks shocked. And he’s right: Why would I go back for more? It seems masochistic. But it’s something deeper that drives me back to her—an instinct, a shared blood—hard to explain if you’re not within it. Try as I might to hate her, I can’t seem to sidestep feeling love.
“I know her,” I say. I know exactly why she is the way she is.
“Is that why you decided to stay here?” he asks. “In Moses River, I mean?”
At my chest, Will makes the softest coo. I stayed to fix things, to heal all the wrongs. To take my sister’s place.
But I don’t say any of that. I just shrug.
“Right,” Sully says. He swallows hard, and we both stare at the table, lost for a minute in the past. “There’s something that’s been nagging at me.” His eyes bore into mine. “Alex said she was the guarder. What did she mean? Because of her job?”
I kiss Will on the bridge of his nose, adjust Pim’s clothespin on the blanket wrapped around him. “It’s her role in a game,” I say. “Hurry home. The game we played as kids on the day my brother died.”
I won’t say that I ran from the tree line that day to see Pim on the ledge of that grain truck, his little toes hooked over the rim, the wooden clothespin in the dark of his fist. Or how I saw Alex at the very top of the ladder, flailing at the peg, grabbing at it, trying to become the guarder, shouting furiously, so mad at him that she shoved him, hard, and he fell down, down, down into the grain until he was out of sight. I wish I could tell him all of this, but I can’t. I won’t. Sometimes words aren’t enough, or they just don’t matter. And even when sisterhood is a prison, like it has been for me, it’s always, always a vault.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, I need to thank my editors, Nita Pronovost and Sarah St. Pierre, who helped me through the maze of this book and kept telling me there was gold in it. Writing is without question a collaboration, and yet the fact of that remains largely unsung. Nita and Sarah, thank you for keeping me going, and for knowing me well enough to send up flares when I needed them.
To my agent, Carolyn Forde, whose honesty, dedication, and all-around total ability to get it makes me so happy to be on her team, and even allows me to overlook the New York rooftop parties she
keeps going to without me. Thanks for everything, as always, and I look forward to more fun.
To the fantastic team at Simon & Schuster Canada—FQ., Adria Iwasutiak, my amazing publicist Rita Silva, Kevin Hanson, et al. Thanks also to Jenny Chen and the team at Crooked Lane for understanding this book so well.
I needed professional insight throughout this process, and in gleaning it, I realize how many strong, frontline women I know who are doing some of the world’s most stressful jobs. Thank you to Karen Scott, Lois Lien, Christine Watson, Shannon Thast, Paula Gummerson, Lisa Rutherglen, Lisa Schmidtke, Sophie McLean, Carrie Mowery, and Susan Barth for everything you told me and everything you know. Massive respect to all of you, and if I got anything wrong, it’s my misrepresentation, not yours.
To the 24-Hour Chevy Stevens Help Line, which has been made available to me daily since 2017. Chevy, you’re a legend, my friend, and I ADORE YOU. Look, I even wrote it in capitals.
To Jo Histed, Sal Burdon, Sue Watt, Jonathan Watt, Robbie Nay, Kerry Elkins, Robyn Harding, Bertrand Pirel, and those in the inner circle. Writers need a community of people they trust, be it other writers, readers, bloggers, friends, and Instagramers: thanks to all those who post and tag supportively. You’d be amazed how far a kind comment can carry a writer on a self-doubting day.
To Empire Coffee in Nelson, British Columbia, where I wrote almost all of this novel, willfully disregarding the No Computer Camping sign to my left. Thanks to Joanne and the team for not kicking me out.
And finally, most important, to Clint, Cash, and Ruby. Hey, I finished the book! Here it is with all my love.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Roz Nay’s debut novel, Our Little Secret, was a national bestseller in Canada, won the Douglas Kennedy Prize for best foreign thriller in France, and was nominated for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Mystery and the Arthur Ellis Best First Novel Award. Roz has lived and worked in Africa, Australia, the US, and the UK. She now lives in British Columbia, Canada, with her husband and two children.
This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Roz Nay
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-64385-479-3
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-64385-480-9
Cover design by Melanie Sun
Printed in the United States.
www.crookedlanebooks.com
Crooked Lane Books
34 West 27th St., 10th
Floor New York, NY 10001
First Edition: July 2020
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