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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

Once he hung up, he turned on the voice recorder and played back the rest of his conversation with Nicola. Listened to his entire, three-minute-long I-hate-Mommy harangue. Then he erased it. Nicola was right. It had been very, very harsh.

He was staying at an airport hotel in Newark, a big block of a building as generic as his rental car. He tapped its address into the GPS app on his phone and started up the car without turning on the radio. He watched the mother and son leave the lot in their SUV, listening to the rasp of his rental car’s engine and Siri’s barking directions and recalling, without wanting to, the one thing he hadn’t mentioned in his harangue: his mother’s death; his part in it.

As he pulled out of the parking lot and turned left on the busy road, following the directions leading up to the highway, he allowed himself to remember that afternoon six months ago: the acrid smell of Kate’s room in the so-called sober living house and the way he’d brushed her hair from her forehead, a tender gesture she’d never feel. He recalled how cold her skin had been and the glassiness of her eyes, like a light had gone off behind them. He recalled how he’d cried out and the helper had rushed in (What did she like to be called? The resident associate?), how she’d checked Kate’s pulse at her wrist and neck and said, without seeming to bear any responsibility, that it had been their third overdose that year. He remembered how he’d cried for his mother—not because he’d known and loved her and now she was gone, but because he hadn’t known her, and now he never would.

It had been Dean who had suggested Quentin do a podcast on the murders. He’d told Summer about the idea first, the two of them conspiring behind Quentin’s back as though they were planning a surprise party, then cornering him one night at the bungalow, when Summer had been over for dinner. “It will help you get closure.” One of them had said it, Dean or Summer. At this point, he wasn’t sure which.

It had made some sense at the time, Quentin supposed. He never would have agreed to it if it hadn’t. But now that dinner at the bungalow felt to him like the opening scene in an endless nightmare—the murders, the fallout from them now occupying his every thought, every dream. Closure. What a joke. Mitchell Bloom’s line of shrink-interrogation couldn’t have been more on the nose.