You Should Have Told Me - Softcover

Konen, Leah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 059353994X ISBN 13: 9780593539941

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

A new mother chases the secrets her partner left behind after his sudden disappearance in this pulse-pounding domestic thriller from the author of The Perfect Escape.

Janie needs a break: her baby won’t sleep, she’s struggling with motherhood, and a secret from her past threatens to tear her new family apart. So when her partner, Max, offers to do their baby’s feedings that night so she can finally get some sleep, she jumps at the chance. But when Janie wakes up at three a.m., her daughter is screaming alone in her bassinet … Max has vanished.
 
Alone with a newborn and desperate for answers, Janie searches for Max, but the more she learns about the man she loves, the more she wonders how well she knew him at all. When a woman is murdered and Max becomes the prime suspect, Janie must face her partner’s secrets—and her own—if she ever wants her daughter to see her father again.
 
An endlessly suspenseful and surprising look at both the beauty and darkness of modern motherhood, You Should Have Told Me is a roller-coaster of a thriller with family at its heart.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Leah Konen is the author of The Perfect Escape and All the Broken People and of several young adult novels, including Love and Other Train Wrecks and The Romantics. She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she studied journalism and English literature. She lives in Brooklyn and Saugerties, New York, with her husband; their daughter, Eleanor; and their dog, Farley.

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1

10:43 a.m.

A cold-blooded scream, piercing through the cloying music.

I looked down to see Freya writhing, unlatched from my breast, my nipple shriveled up from the shock of exposure, the air chilly despite the beating sun.

Heads instantly turned my way, the families of Kingston gawking at the new parents who never should have brought such a young baby to a concert aimed at older kids. Freya followed her scream with a monkey cry, an eeee-eeee-eeee I'd never heard before becoming a mother, one that was so common now.

Max reached into the backpack and pulled out the llama pacifier-Freya's favorite-but I shook my head and pressed her, maybe a little too firmly, back onto my boob. She stopped, thank god, just as the two guys in front went into their next verse.

"Now what do we do two times a day, every day?" the one with the extremely bushy beard asked, tapping at the face of his guitar.

"Sometimes even three times!" the other guy answered, resting his pick briefly between his teeth and stretching a pair of heavily tattooed arms.

Then, in tandem, as if the answer were the most exciting thing in the world: "We brush our teeth!"

The crowd, a smattering of families scattered across the grass of Forsyth Park, cheered along, and the song continued. When we wake up in the morning and get ready for the day, we brush our teeth, wa-hoo-a-doodley-doo, we brush our teeth, one time and definitely two...

One woman was still looking our way, even though Freya was quiet now-a beautiful woman, one you might even call striking, with piercing eyes, creamy skin framed by chunky bangs, and long glossy hair. I looked down, avoiding her gaze. Stared for a moment at the heavy wool blanket Max laid out a half hour ago. Shifted against the grass, the earth still hard and thawing beneath us, an Ides of March cold emanating from beneath. I hated to be watched as a mother. I always felt as if I weren't measuring up.
 
By the time I looked up, the woman had turned around, back to the music, back to her family. Max squeezed my hand, grounding me. "You okay?"

I nodded, forcing a smile. Max's dark brown eyes shone, and his wavy hair, due for a cut, flopped in front of his eyes, his beard covered lightly in this wax product I'd got him one Christmas, his crow's-feet crinkling as a smile stretched across his face. He looked terribly handsome still, despite the lack of sleep, despite the circles beneath his eyes. What's more, he looked hopeful, brimming with new-parent bliss, a burp cloth tossed over his shoulder for the moment Freya needed it. He was so good, his presence the balm that softened the rough edges of my emotions, the highs and lows and super-lows of our post-Freya world. When he was beside me-helping, supporting, looking at her with such awe and love-I almost felt it would all be okay.

I supposed it was destined to be this way, I thought, as I adjusted Freya on my breast. Max had been all encouragement, all assurances, from the moment he found out I was pregnant. He was thirty-seven when I met him, with a sense you could almost feel, seeping from his pores, that it was time to slow down. His band, the Velvet Hope, a synth-y alt-rock act that I genuinely loved, had brought him a bit of indie and festival-circuit fame but little in the way of money. Shortly before we'd met, he'd thrown most of his energy into a business offering music lessons to kids in Manhattan and Brooklyn. By the time he moved in with me six months later, he had a nice little operation going. Two instructors working under him. A reputation among the Upper East Side and Park Slope elite, buoyed by the fact that rich parents could hire the lead singer and co-founder of the Velvet Hope to teach their kids guitar chords.

"This is a blessing," he'd said, when I'd showed him those two lines on the test, my face pale, my palms cold, caught between uncontrollable tears and panicked breaths. "This is a good thing."

Now, Max leaned down and kissed the bottom of Freya's six-week-old foot, covered in a knit bootie his hippie aunt Tammy had crocheted just for her. Freya's crying, her fussing and needing, never seemed to bother Max the same way it did me. He took a sip of coffee, the foam of his latte leaving a light print of white against his reddish-brown mustache. "You know we saw these guys in Brooklyn, right?"

"Really?" I asked. Brooklyn felt like a foreign, faraway land now, even though it was only two hours south.

"Totally," Max went on, stretching his legs out, wiggling his toes beneath the black suede Vans he always wore. "The band was called Roadkill. It was that show at the Bell House, the one with the strobe lights that didn't have the warning, where the girl passed out because of all the flashing."

"That show?" It had been one of those early Janie-and-Max moments, not so early that we were still playing it casual, but early enough that the world felt like its own kind of magic as we ambled through it, hand in hand. We'd gone out to a French restaurant on the Brooklyn waterfront, blowing Max's newly arrived, meager-yet-momentous royalty check on Chablis and steak frites. We'd found our way to the show after, rolling into one of our favorite venues much drunker on each other than the two glasses of wine we'd each had, Liana holding space for us near the stage. The three of us shook and shimmied and sang along like you can only do when you have absolutely nowhere important to be the next day. All fun and games until a girl dancing next to us passed out, Max instantly jumping into action, clearing the crowd, calling an ambulance, the three of us waiting outside with her friends until she was taken to Brooklyn Methodist. Such a hero he seemed, then and now. The type to swoop in and take care of things when someone was in need. The type who never thought: Someone else will do it. The type whose convictions turned so seamlessly into actions.

Max raised an eyebrow. "The very one. I hope that girl was okay."

That's Max for you, I thought, my heart swelling at how lucky I was to have found him. Still worried about a girl he didn't even know from however many years earlier.

"Anyway," he went on. "The relevant info is, these guys never really made it in the indie scene, but I googled them when I saw this in The Daily Freeman, and they have something like ten successful kids' albums. They're making real money. It's crazy."

I took in the duo properly: Ratty T-shirts. Gauged earlobes. Hats that looked plucked from the dusty shelves of one thrift store or another.

I turned to Max. "Is that something that you'd want to do one day?"

"Never say never, right?" he replied. "Freya would love it, I'm sure."

It wouldn't be the same. It would be just another thing that's been taken over by the baby.

Max, ever the optimist, was happy he'd left the Velvet Hope. It was me who seemed to miss it more, the life we'd had before Freya had turned everything to oversized maxi pads, cracked nipples, and burp cloths.

The woman up front turned again, and for a moment, I forgot about bright stage lights and loud music and the magic of before. "See that woman," I said, quiet as I could. "She keeps looking at us. At me and Freya."

Max looked her way, and she immediately turned around.

"Who?" he asked.

"The one with the long hair," I said. "And the mermaid tattoo. I know Freya was screaming, but I can't do anything about it now."

Max hesitated, in that way he had of hesitating these days, when he thought I was about to get upset. He slipped his hand over mine, squeezed slightly. "It's a kids' concert. Wailing children are par for the course."

I nodded, then slipped my hand from Max's and took out my phone, checking the time. His parents and Liana,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 059353994X
• ISBN 13: 9780593539941
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 416
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland