Before You Knew My Name, Jacqueline Bublitz [best book club books for discussion txt] 📗

himself, he finally let himself imagine a stranger pawing at my skin, saw him breaking me open and leaving me there on the rocks. For somebody else to find.

Mr Jackson. Not the only person to wade into the muck of my life, but the only one to know the softness of my skin, the tender flesh, the way I dissolved like snow.

He is certain he will never look at those pictures again. Never revisit the honesty, the beauty he has inadvertently preserved. But he knows, too, they are a ticking bomb, a catalogue of his mistakes. Just like he knows, inevitably, the knock will come.

Still, when they show up at his door in their dark blue uniforms, with their notebooks out and guns tucked, he is unprepared. Sits on that small, sheet-covered couch, shaking. Just a few questions. Not a suspect. Might be able to help with the investigation. If we could just—

And the female detective. Her eyes taking in the books on their crates, the paintings, the coil of his body.

‘What was she doing here with you, anyway?’

The lies come easy. She was a troubled young woman. She had nowhere else to go. She needed a place to sleep, some shelter for a few weeks. She’d been a good student; he’d showed her some care. Maybe she’d spun a story or two to her friend Tammy, tried to make it seem more exciting. ‘This kind of thing can happen with teenage girls, right?’ They should know that Tammy herself was a bit of trouble, and no matter what she might have said, he never touched Alice. She was just a poor kid he was trying to help out of a tight spot. He simply wanted to help her on her way.

It cannot be his fault he never imagined where she’d end up.

Ruby starts running again. Josh’s message, just as she was feeling her way toward him, has set her spinning. For the first time, she considers what she should have said to Ash all those years ago, when he told her he was engaged. Sees a different version of herself, where she went home alone after that first drink with him, bemoaning timing and missed opportunities, another almost in her life. What if she had been that woman instead? One strong enough to walk away, no matter how intense the pull? It does not necessarily feel good to ignore Josh’s texts, to shut him out, but she knows this temporary discomfort is nothing compared to the pain ahead if she falls for another man who can’t decide. Besides, he’d lied to her, hadn’t he? When she said divorce was a kind of death. That’s when he should have told her the truth. That’s when he should have said he was technically still married, because omission is a lie, too; she knows that well enough.

She is angry at Josh for being dishonest, when she thought she had found someone who valued the truth. This makes her upset with Lennie and Sue, too. She is certain they knew he was still married, and certain they should have told her, when Sue had readily shared the facts of her own divorce, and Lennie talked about romance all the time. How is it possible that Josh’s wife never came up in conversation, not once? In quieter moments, Ruby knows she is being unreasonable, that separation is not the same as marriage. But it’s not exactly an ending either, so she lets herself feel the sting of betrayal, decides she wants nothing to do with any of them right now. It’s not only Josh’s messages that she leaves unanswered as the week goes by.

When Ruby is adrift, I am adrift. In the days after finding out about Josh, we return to wandering the streets of this city, neither coming nor going anywhere. She considers moving home to Melbourne. I don’t even know where home is anymore. Just when I think I have it figured out, the game changes all over again. I thought that once I had my name back, once those waves stopped crashing around me, I’d know what to do. Maybe even find out where those other girls go.

But here I am, still unseen. Who Killed Alice Lee? is not really a question about me, is it? But it’s the only one people seem to ask now.

At any rate, without Death Club as our compass, we seem to have ended up back where we started. A lonely woman and a lonely dead girl together in New York. Ruby Jones and Alice Lee. Stuck in our tug of war between the living and the dead.

She never goes back to the river. Has avoided the park since the morning of my murder. Won’t even walk along Riverside Drive, there above the Hudson, the promise of summer drawing people from their expensive houses, thawing them out, so that the streets and the fields and the running tracks are never empty these days, at least not until the sun goes down. Ruby has returned to the rocks a thousand times in her head, has pored over photographs of the crime scene, so that it exists as a map in her head, but anytime her feet turn toward the park, something in her rebels, pushes her back. She wishes she could talk to Lennie and Sue about it. Or better yet, Josh, who once told her that he’d had to force himself to return to the scene of his bike accident, how it had taken him weeks to build up the nerve. And how, when he finally got there, he soon discovered he couldn’t recognise a thing. He sat down in what might have been the wrong place entirely, his blood soaked into the soil around some other tree, and realised how inconsequential his accident had been in the grand scheme of things.

‘It’s not as if the place remembers you,’ he had said to Ruby, shaking his head.

If they were still talking to