Chapters (51)
- Cover
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Forty-One
- Forty-Two
- Forty-Three
- Acknowledgments
- P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
- About the Author
- About the Book
- Also by Alison Gaylin
- About the Publisher
Robin threw her arms around her mother’s neck, Mom’s lips against her ear. “It wasn’t like that,” Mom said, in a voice so weak and quiet, it was more pressure than sound. “He never hit me. He cared about me,” she whispered. “Jenny . . . was trying to . . . hurt you . . .”
Robin kissed her mother’s forehead, the skin burning her lips. “Don’t leave me,” she said. “Please, Mom. Please stay.”
“I killed a cop. Shot him. He had a family. Two little girls. I . . . I didn’t . . . deserve a life like . . .”
“Sssh.”
“Daddy was a good doctor, Robbie. He was a good man. And he loved you so much.”
Her mother’s body went still. Robin put a hand against her neck, her wrist. She put her head to her chest and heard nothing. She screamed, wailed. Her throat scraped raw from it, mingling with Nicola’s cries . . . “April, no, no, no . . .”
She heard footsteps above her. Eric’s voice calling her name, but she couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. She wanted to die.
Across the floor, she saw the gun—the heavy dark threat of it, smoke lifting from the barrel. She started to reach for it, but Nicola grabbed it first. Grabbed it off the floor, her mouth wrenched open. “April.”
Behind her, Robin heard Eric’s footsteps on the stairs. She heard her name again. This time from Nicola. “I’m sorry, Robin,” Nicola said. “I ruined everything.”
And then she put the barrel to her chin and pulled the trigger.
Forty-Two
Eight months later
Summer
DEATH VALLEY HAD a perfume to it—sand and baked earth and at this time of the year, the strawlike sweetness of desert spring. Back when Quentin had told Summer about his dream podcast—Reg Sharkey and himself, making peace with the spot that had once been the Gideon compound—she’d had one response: You couldn’t pay me enough money to fry in that sweatbox.
But as she saw now, Quentin had been right. As usual. She wished he were here now. But in a way, she liked to think, he was. She was sitting in the back of a rented convertible Mustang, the sun heavy and warm on the back of her neck. Robin Diamond was beside her. They were recording the eighth and final installment of the Closure podcast, Robin having described the series of events that ultimately brought her here, to Southern California, where she planned on living indefinitely, even though her estranged husband tried, on a weekly basis, to reconcile. “He says we’re each other’s only family,” Robin was saying now. “But after everything that’s happened, I don’t know that that’s such a selling point.”