She hoped instead that Dr. Jerry was right. Leigh wanted to continue to have a relationship with her sister. She wanted the Callie who wasn’t on heroin, who had a job at a vet clinic and fostered baby animals and came by for lunch every weekend and made Maddy laugh at funny jokes about turtles being farty assholes.
For now, Leigh had their last moment together in Dr. Jerry’s office. The way that Callie had held her. The way that she had forgiven Leigh for her lie that had turned into a secret that had festered into a betrayal.
If this is the guilt you’ve been carrying around for your entire adult life, then set it the fuck down.
Leigh hadn’t felt the burden lift when Callie had said the words, but with every day that passed, she felt a lightness in her chest, as if slowly, eventually—maybe—the weight would finally, one day, be gone.
There were other more tangible things that Callie had left Leigh to remember her by. Dr. Jerry had found Callie’s backpack inside the breakroom. A Boo Radley assortment was inside—a tanning salon membership card for Juliabelle Gatsby, a DeKalb County Library card for Himari Takahashi, a paperback book on snails, a burner phone, twelve dollars, an extra pair of socks, Leigh’s Chicago driver’s license that Callie had stolen out of her wallet, and a tiny corner of the blanket that had been wrapped around Maddy inside the cat carrier.
The last two items were particularly meaningful. During the past sixteen years, Callie had been to jail, to prison, to various rehabs, and had lived in cheap motels and on the street, but she had managed to hang onto a photo of Leigh, and Maddy’s baby blanket.
Her daughter still had the blanket at home. She still did not know the story of the missing piece. Walter and Leigh went back and forth about whether or not it was time to tell her the truth. Every time they decided they had to be honest, that there wasn’t a choice—that the secret had already turned into a lie and it wouldn’t be too long before it blossomed into a betrayal—Callie talked them out of it.
She had left a note for Leigh inside of her backpack, the words mirroring the note she had left with Maddy sixteen years ago. Callie had obviously written it after their conversation in Dr. Jerry’s office, just as Callie had obviously known that she was never going to see Leigh ever again.
Please accept the gift of your beautiful life, Callie had written. I am so proud of you, my lovely sister. I know that no matter what happens, you and Walter will always and forever keep Maddy happy and safe. I only ask that you don’t ever tell her our secret, for her life which will be so much happier without me. I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU!
“Hey.” Walter was stamping out Linda’s smoldering cigarettes. “Who was that lady in the Jag?”
“Andrew’s mother.” Leigh watched Walter look inside of the garbage bag. He turned over the VHS tapes to read the labels. Callie #8. Callie #12. Harleigh & Callie.
Walter asked, “What did she want?”
“Absolution.”
Walter threw the tapes back in the bag. “Did you give it to her?”
“No,” Leigh said. “You have to earn it.”
Dear Reader
Dear Reader
Early in my career, I chose to write my novels without marking a particular point in time. I wanted the stories to stand alone without news cycles or pop culture intruding into the narrative. My approach changed as I started working on my Will Trent series and standalones, when it became more important to me to anchor the books in the now as a way to hold up a mirror to society. I wanted to ask questions with my fiction, like how we got to #metoo (Cop Town), how we became so inured to violence against women (Pretty Girls), or even how we ended up with an angry mob breaking down the doors of the Capitol (The Last Widow).
There’s always a delicate balance between writing about social issues and keeping up the driving pace of a thriller. I am at my very core a thriller author, and I never want to slow down or interfere with the rhythm of a story to climb onto a soapbox. I try very hard to present both sides, even when I don’t agree with the opposing opinion. With this in mind, I started framing the story that became False Witness. I knew that I wanted to incorporate the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, but I also knew that the story was not about the pandemic so much as about how people are managing to live through it. And, of course, my perspective is not just as an American, or as a Georgian, or even as an Atlantan—like everyone else, how I view the world is seen through the lens of who I am as an individual.
As I started work in March 2020, I had to be somewhat of a futurist in trying to predict what life would be like in roughly one year’s time. Obviously, a lot changed over the course of my writing. At first we were told to forgo masks so that hospitals would not run out of supplies, then we were told that we should all be wearing masks (then double masks); initially we were told to wear gloves, then we were told gloves offered a false sense of safety; first we were told to wash down our groceries, then we were told they’re fine; then there were the variants and so on and so on until finally, thankfully, the vaccines were released, which was wonderful news but also necessitated incorporating their somewhat confusing roll-out into a novel that was nearly finished—though it must be said that these were small hurdles compared to the worldwide loss and tragedy caused by this horrible virus.
As of this writing, we’ve crossed the devastating milestone of 500,000 dead in the United States. Then, there are the tens of millions of survivors—some of whom are experiencing Long-Covid or whose lives will be forever marked by the disease. Because of the inherent loneliness of a Covid death, our medical professionals have suffered untold trauma witnessing firsthand the ravages of this terrible virus. Our medical examiners, coroners, and funeral homes have endured an overwhelming volume of dead. Educators, frontline workers, first responders—the lists are endless because the pandemic has touched every single person on earth in ways both big and small. The impact of this daily mass casualty event will be felt for generations. Still unknown is how the suspension of grief will eventually seep out into our lives. We know from studying childhood abuse that trauma can lead to everything from depression, PTSD, cardiovascular issues such as stroke and heart attack, cancer, a heightened risk for drug and alcohol abuse and in some extreme cases, suicidal ideation. We have yet to reckon with what the world will look like in fifteen or twenty years’ time when Zoomers are raising children of their own.
Though I love my readers, I have always written my books for myself, using fiction to process the world around me. As I set out to realistically incorporate the pandemic into False Witness, I looked to recent history for cues. In many ways the evolution of our understanding of Covid-19 mirrors the beginning of what was then called the AIDS crisis, during which my generation experienced a painful coming of age. As with SARS-CoV-2, there were a lot of unknowns when HIV first reared its ugly head. Scientists didn’t immediately know how it was transmitted, how it worked, where it had come from—so the advisories changed almost monthly and the homophobia and racism ran rampant. And then of course the way people responded to HIV/AIDS ran the gamut from fear to anger to denial to acceptance to full-on fuck-its. Though AIDS was far, far more deadly than Covid (and transmission was thankfully not airborne), a lot of those same attitudes have been on display in our response to the Covid-19 pandemic. And I should add that during both of these transformational tragedies, we have seen remarkable caring and kindness countering what feels like incomprehensible hate. Nothing brings out our humanity, or lack thereof, like a crisis.
As terrible as these last eighteen months have been, the ensuing crisis has provided a foundation for the kind of socially conscious storytelling that has come to define my work. Covid has exposed the ever-widening chasm between the haves and have-nots, spotlighted the housing crisis and food insecurity, focused attention on the lack of proper funding for schools, hospitals and elder care, exposed a bankruptcy of trust in our government institutions, exacerbated the horrendous treatment of inmates in our jails and prisons, exponentially worsened xenophobic, misogynistic, and racist
hate speech, heightened racial inequalities, and as usual, has grossly over-burdened the lives of women; all topics that I’ve attempted to touch on within the pages of the book you now hold in your hands. All issues I’m striving to make sense of, to have greater empathy for, with hopes for a deeper understanding.
One of my favorite short novels is Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, which is set during the influenza epidemic of 1918. The main character is stricken with the disease, just as Porter herself was in real life, and we get a firsthand glimpse of the awful effects of the virus—both through the social insecurity of the character’s fear of losing her job and being evicted by her landlady, to the four to five days she had to wait before there was room for her at the hospital, to the fever dreams and hallucinations brought on by the lurking presence of the Pale Rider: Death. The last line of the story is both timeless and prescient, and I think it will encapsulate how we’ll all likely feel when we’re through the worst of this cruel pandemic and we manage to find our way to a new normal—
“Now there would be time for everything.”
Karin Slaughter
February 26, 2021
Atlanta, Georgia
Keep Reading …
Enjoyed False Witness? Make sure you’ve read Karin Slaughter’s previous books:
She runs
A woman runs alone in the woods. She convinces herself she’s safe.
He watches
But a predator is watching from the shadows. Waiting for the perfect moment to attack.
He waits
They thought they caught him. But another victim has just been found.
The hunt has only just begun. And the killer is ready to strike again …
Click here to order a copy of The Silent Wife.
Three …
A woman is abducted in front of her child.
Two …
A month later, a second is taken in explosive circumstances.
One …
But the web is bigger and darker than anyone could imagine. The clock is ticking to uncover the truth.
Click here to order a copy of The Last Widow.
A terrifying act of violence …
It takes a split second for your life to change forever. And for Andrea Oliver that split second is a mass shooting in her local mall.
A woman whose life is built on a lie …
But this shocking act is only the start. Because then, as the bodies fall around them, Andy’s mother Laura takes a step forward into the line of fire.
A fight for survival …
Hours later, Laura is in hospital, her face splashed over the newspapers. But the danger has only just begun. Now Andy must embark on a desperate race against time to uncover the secrets of her mother’s past before any more blood is shed …
Click here to order a copy of Pieces of Her.
One ran. One stayed. But who is … the good daughter?
Twenty-eight years ago, Charlotte and Samantha Quinn’s childhoods were destroyed by a terrifying attack on their family home. It left their mother dead. It left their father – a notorious defence attorney – devastated. And it left the family consumed by secrets from that shocking night.
Twenty-eight years later, Charlie has followed in her father’s footsteps to become a lawyer. But when violence comes to their home town again, the case triggers memories she’s desperately tried to suppress. Because the shocking truth about the crime which destroyed her family won’t stay buried for ever …
Click here to order a copy of The Good Daughter.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First thanks always goes to Victoria Sanders and Kate Elton, who have known me longer than I have known myself. Thanks to the tiebreakers, Emily Krump and Kathryn Cheshire—as well as the entire GPP team. At VSA, I am very grateful for Bernadette Baker-Baughman, who has seemingly endless patience (or a doll of me that she stabs every morning).
Kaveh Khajavi, Chip Pendleton, and Mandy Blackmon answered my peculiar skeletal and joint inquiries. David Harper has been helping me kill people for twenty years, and as usual, his input was exceptionally helpful, even as he was riding out the devastating Texas snow and ice storms with his cell phone and a set of channel locks. Elise Diffie assisted me with veterinary clinic machinations, though all nefarious workarounds are my own. Also, she might be the only person reading this book who realizes how truly hilarious the name Deux Claude is for a Great Pyrenees.
Alafair Burke, Patricia Friedman, and Max Hirsh assisted me with the legalities—any mistakes are my own (tragically, the law is never what you want it to be). For those of you who are wondering: on March 14, 2020, the Chief Justice of Georgia’s Supreme Court issued a state-wide order prohibiting all jury trials “due to the number of people required to gather at courthouses.” By October, the prohibition was lifted, but a few days before Christmas, soaring infection rates forced the Chief Justice to reinstate the prohibition. On March 9, 2021, the prohibition was lifted again, citing that the “dangerous surge of Covid-19 cases recently has declined.” That’s where we are as of now, and I fervently hope it will stay that way.
Lastly, thanks to D.A. for putting up with my long absences (both physical and mental) during the writing of this story. Having enjoyed the quarantine lifestyle for many years, I thought it would be easier; alas, it was not. Thanks to my dad for always being there no matter what. I anticipate a rapid return to soup and cornbread deliveries now that the worst is behind us. And to my sister: thank you so much for being my sister.
Last lastly: I took many liberties when writing about drugs and how to use them because I am not in the business of offering how-tos. If you are one of the many people struggling with addiction, please know that there is always someone out there who loves you.
About the Author
Karin Slaughter is one of the world’s most popular storytellers. Published in 120 countries with more than 35 million copies sold across the globe, her 21 novels have all been Sunday Times bestsellers. Slaughter lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and is the founder of the Save the Libraries project—a nonprofit organization established to support libraries and library programming. Her standalone novel Pieces of Her is in development with Netflix, and the Grant County and Will Trent series are in development for television.
For more information visit KarinSlaughter.com
/AuthorKarinSlaughter
@SlaughterKarin
Also by Karin Slaughter
Blindsighted
Kisscut
A Faint Cold Fear
Indelible
Faithless
Triptych
Skin Privilege
Fractured
Genesis
Broken
Fallen
Criminal
Unseen
Cop Town
Pretty Girls
The Kept Woman
The Good Daughter
Pieces of Her
The Last Widow
The Silent Wife
EBOOK ORIGINALS
Snatched
Cold, Cold Heart
Busted
Blonde Hair, Blue Eyes
Last Breath
Cleaning the Gold (with Lee Child)
NOVELLAS AND STORIES
Like a Charm (Editor)
Martin Misunderstood
About the Publisher
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