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Back Never Look Back Save as PDF
Chapters (51)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. One
  4. Two
  5. Three
  6. Four
  7. Five
  8. Six
  9. Seven
  10. Eight
  11. Nine
  12. Ten
  13. Eleven
  14. Twelve
  15. Thirteen
  16. Fourteen
  17. Fifteen
  18. Sixteen
  19. Seventeen
  20. Eighteen
  21. Nineteen
  22. Twenty
  23. Twenty-One
  24. Twenty-Two
  25. Twenty-Three
  26. Twenty-Four
  27. Twenty-Five
  28. Twenty-Six
  29. Twenty-Seven
  30. Twenty-Eight
  31. Twenty-Nine
  32. Thirty
  33. Thirty-One
  34. Thirty-Two
  35. Thirty-Three
  36. Thirty-Four
  37. Thirty-Five
  38. Thirty-Six
  39. Thirty-Seven
  40. Thirty-Eight
  41. Thirty-Nine
  42. Forty
  43. Forty-One
  44. Forty-Two
  45. Forty-Three
  46. Acknowledgments
  47. P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
  48. About the Author
  49. About the Book
  50. Also by Alison Gaylin
  51. About the Publisher

Gabriel cried. Wet sobs I could feel through the plastic. Boys aren’t supposed to cry like that. It turned my stomach. When I hung up, I thought, thank God that’s over. But it wasn’t, was it? My white lie, the thing that was supposed to make it easier on both of us. That lie killed my stepdad. I killed Papa Pete.

Now we’re sitting in Papa Pete’s car. Gabriel’s behind the wheel and Kool & the Gang is on the radio and I’m not going to cry. I can’t cry in front of him. I can’t even look unhappy, or I’ll get shot too, and Jenny will have no one. So I push Papa Pete out of my mind. Kind Papa Pete who tried his best to cook Mom’s recipes after she died and who told me he loved me the same as Jenny—that I was his real daughter, just as much as her. I tell myself not to think of him, ever again.

I make myself smile. At first, my lips won’t stop twitching but after a while it gets easier. I mouth the words to “Hollywood Swinging” and bop my head to the hey, hey, heys.

Gabriel grins at me. He tells me my smile is sexy. He sings along with the song and then he says maybe we’ll wind up in Hollywood ourselves—a supercouple, like Farrah Fawcett and Lee Majors.

He puts his hand on my knee. The smile stays plastered to my face. “Oh baby,” I tell him, “that would be a dream come true.”

Once you tell one lie, you wind up lying forever.

Seven

Robin

WHEN IT STARTS, it’s barely perceptible. An unmet gaze. The flushing of his skin at an odd moment. A late-night work call, taken in another room.

The next phase, though, is harder to ignore. You can feel the rift, the cold whistling through it, that awful unbreachable gap. Or so it seemed to Robin Diamond as she scanned her husband’s Twitter feed while waiting for her boss, Eileen, to read her column, clicking on his “tweets and replies” with her jaw clenched. Eric Diamond, executive producer on a cable TV “news” show called Shawn Labatoir’s Anger Management, always said he had little time for social media. He used it solely to plug his stories, he said. No personal pictures or information.