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

was angry when she wouldn’t look up, wouldn’t engage with him. He watched her set up those photographs of the river and the rain and felt all those bad days swell up in him like a balloon, until he released the pressure through his fists, through fingers coming down hard on this young woman’s body. Puncturing her as if she were the one who needed deflating. He was angry that she did not smile. Angry at her dismissal. When his cigarette went out, when he asked if she had a light, and she shook her head no, he said she was being rude, and it wasn’t only the sky cracked through when he bore down on her with his righteous indignation.

Such self-preservation all these years, only to find herself unbound by a man who was angry at the light going out.

So, he took hers instead.

Shook her, fists on flesh, struggling, elbows pushing. The split second where she stood a chance, and then she was down, hitting rocks and earth. And he towered over her, enjoyed how large this made him feel, as he smashed that camera lens down on her forehead, over and over. Immediately disgusted by the mess of her face, he wrapped his hands around her skinny, wet throat. Discovered he could destroy the entire city that was this young woman, everything she had been and would be. The rubble of a life, and he was the bomb, exploding. It felt—as he unzipped his jeans, turned her head away so he did not have to look at the unseemliness before him—like he was the most powerful man in the world. That everything was his for the taking.

He never did get that light for his half-smoked cigarette. Had to wait until he got home, rummaging around the all-sorts bowl, looking for matches, careful and quiet. The storm intensifying, a girl’s bloody underwear stuffed in his pocket, the rest of her belongings gathered like gifts.

She should have been nicer to him. He was only asking for a light. It certainly seemed to him, later that morning, as he listened to the rain and the sirens blaring, his fingers quivering toward them, that the calming pleasure of a cigarette might have slowed things down a little. Had she smiled, tried harder, he may even have given her the chance to say yes to his advances.

(This is the world he has created. I’m ready to tell you a little more now. Stay with me as we take that closer look. But don’t you believe a single thing he says about me.)

TWENTY

NOAH WATCHES AS PEOPLE IN UNIFORM FAN OUT THROUGH his apartment, considers the elegance of their movements, their certainty of purpose. The way each member of the investigative unit deftly lifts and dusts and kneels. Alone and all together, a single question in pursuit of an answer. To Noah, observing from his armchair, it looks like a complex, beautiful ballet. Franklin sits mournfully at his feet, unsure of these busy strangers who don’t smile at him, nor his human. All of them overlooking the young girl in the room, watching from her seat at the piano.

Noah went to the police as soon as they released my name. Said he might have details they’d be interested in. Offered up his apartment—‘No warrant necessary’—and consented to the blood tests and swabs, dismissing any offer of coffee or condolence. He was there for one thing, and one thing only. To help them find the man who hurt Alice Lee.

Noah still doesn’t like to think of me as dead.

When I disappeared the very same day they found a young girl’s body in Riverside Park, he refused to think that anything could, or had, happened to me. That first day, he turned away from the sirens and the stories, cancelled all of his dog-sitting appointments, and sat in the living room with Franklin, waiting for me to come home. They sat there together as the hours passed, watching the rain smash against the windows, and they were still there the next morning, this man and his dog, listening for the front door.

When the days passed and that door never clicked open, something in Noah closed down. It was easier for him to believe I had become restless and moved on, than to live with the possibility that those things in the news, those terrible things, had happened to his Baby Joan. For the first time in his life, he chose to look away from the facts, something I never would have imagined. Not from Noah, who taught me about dust and stars. Not from the person who always knew how things worked. When he turned away like that, I mistook what it meant; I thought he shut me out because he didn’t care. He wasn’t the first one to leave me, after all.

Now I see he cared so much that he knew the truth would break him.

He should have gone to the police earlier. Should have accepted what he already knew, deep in his bones, to be true. But know this of my Noah, please. He was not thinking of his own safety when he stayed away. He was only ever thinking of me.

Perhaps I should have understood this earlier, too. That he was never going to be like the other men in my life. That I was right to believe in the kindness of strangers. My lack of faith helped keep us apart after I died—but I’m here with him now. Watching as those investigators examine my stack of IOUs, taking the post-it notes down from the refrigerator door, reading them one by one, all the little promises I left behind. A single blue note flutters to the ground, and a young officer bends to retrieve it. Girl Things, it says, a badly drawn smiley face in place of the full stop. $9.87. Recurring. Noah cannot read the note from where he is sitting, but he can see the officer pause, look