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
He read until the sun began to set and his room grew dark, feeling as though he were on the run with Gabriel and April—Gabriel gripping the wheel of one of many stolen cars, the jumbled thoughts running through his brain as April egged him on, encouraging his madness, driven mad as she was by the untimely death of her mother and the feeling that her stepfather loved Jenny—his biological child—so much more than her . . . He devoured it all, facts and fiction, direct quotes and clear instances of poetic license and paragraphs, pages, where you couldn’t tell the difference, truth and lies bleeding into each other, all to tell the best possible story. Much like a podcast. Much like life.
Quentin was in the final third of the book and feeling bleary-eyed and hungry when a paragraph jumped out at him:
The blood from the gas station murders barely washed from their hands, the killer couple found solace in a roadside diner, where Gabriel relished a plate of steak and eggs and a side of apple pie, washed down with a cheap beer. April’s last meal on the road was more delicate: cinnamon raisin toast and cream cheese, with strawberry jam. “She said her mother used to make it for her,” recalls Gretchen Philips, the waitress who served them. “She said it was her favorite dish.”
“Comfort food,” Quentin whispered.
He removed Nicola Crane’s business card from his pocket and stared at it: A name. A phone number. A P.O. box. The utter lack of information. And he’d never asked her about that—something he normally would have done. He’d gone on and on about himself, his family, without learning about hers. Had she engineered that?
He thought of Nicola’s voice, the honeyed sound of it, so similar to Renee’s. He recalled her tanned, lined face and her sturdy body, but with something so familiar beneath those years of workmanlike muscle, the skin like broken-in leather. Something Quentin knew.
He turned to the middle section of the book and stared at the winter formal picture—April Cooper in her ruffled dress, pale and bony and unformed.
“Is that you?” he whispered to April Cooper’s serious young face. “Is that you, Nicola?”
Sixteen
June 16, 1976
2:00 A.M.
Dear Aurora Grace,