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

it just as quickly, as water stung my cheeks. Feeling the crisp preparation in the air, before lightning once again zagged across the sky and thunder echoed in its wake. Knowing I was as wild as this storm, as full of potential. To capture this would be to give that photography school my self-portrait. Show them the artist I intended to be.

And then the stranger was climbing down over the rocks, coming toward me. Staring at my bare arms, pointing his extinguished cigarette at me, asking if I had a light. It must have been the way I shook my head slightly, or how I turned my attention back to the Leica. My last clear thought, staring through that small viewfinder, was how much lightning bolts reminded me of blood vessels. Veins branching out across the sky.

And then it was him, not the lightning, that split me in two.

Though she’ll never trust these memories after, when she looks down at him now, Ruby sees everything Tom Martin did to me that morning, catches the blinding red of it, flashing across his body. I’m not even sure how it happens. The way she can suddenly view the world from my perspective. There I am, climbing down onto the rocks to get closer to the water, liking the way it reflects the lightning, mirrors the sky. There I am, peering through my viewfinder, framing the world, thinking it is mine for the taking. And there I am, startled, when I sense someone is behind me on the pathway, his eyes a gleam in the dark. Ruby can see every grotesque, electric pulse of him as he approaches me, and more than that—to my absolute horror—she can suddenly feel everything I felt that morning.

As if what happened to me is happening to her, too.

‘Hello there,’ he says, and I think at first that I am going to be okay. He looks normal, this man, in his neat shirt and regular shoes. An insomniac like me, I presume, or a storm chaser, someone more comfortable out in the rain than tucked up in bed. No need to be scared, I tell myself, but I am, all the same, when he climbs over the railing, too, takes his time to come up beside me.

‘Got a light?’ he asks, holding out his half-smoked cigarette, and this time I catch it. The way his voice is far too measured, careful. As if he is barely restraining himself.

‘No,’ I say, squaring my shoulders. Hoping this makes me look stronger than I am. Never let them see that you’re afraid—I read that once, and I do my best to fool him, standing there with my camera between us. I’ve had near misses before, felt danger as a pulse in my throat, and for a while there, as he tries to make conversation about the weather, my camera, what it is I’m doing out here all alone, I think this is going to be one of those times. I keep my answers short, polite, buying myself minutes until the sun comes up. But then he tells me I’m beautiful, says, ‘Do you like to fuck,’ and I know, deep in my bones, that this is not going to be a near miss. When he commands me to smile, when he comes at me with all his smug determination, I acquiesce. Thinking, one last time, that I know what to do here. That I can survive this, if I just play it his way.

Like I said. It surprised me. At the end. The way I had no chance. How swiftly it happened when Tom Martin ended my life.

Ruby sees, feels everything that happened to me, and then she turns and runs, nausea rising in her, replacing her fear. So that when she reaches the safety of the upper levels of the park, she doubles over and heaves, vomiting up everything she has witnessed.

There was just enough time, before she fled, for her to hear a splash, the unmistakable sound of something being thrown into the river.

It is a detail she will remember better this time.

I think she’s hurt. I don’t know if I should go to her. Should I go to her … Tell me what I need to do.

For weeks Ruby has worried that she let me down. Though she never said it to herself, or out loud, she wondered if she could have done something—anything—differently that morning. If she hadn’t got lost or slipped on the rail, or if she’d paid more attention to her surroundings in those minutes before, when she was more worried about the rain. Was there some moment she missed, some way she could have changed things?

All this time, Ruby has been searching for absolution. For a way to say sorry for arriving too late, for not being able to get to the girl, or to whoever came before her, in time. Her obsession with the murder, with me, was her apology.

‘Truly, you did everything right, Ruby.’

That’s what Officer Jennings said after she found me. Today, when she picks up her phone with shaking hands and dials the number on the card Detective O’Byrne gave her that terrible morning, weeks and a lifetime ago, Ruby finally believes it.

Noah was right. New York really is made for second chances.

TWENTY-THREE

IT BEGINS. THEY GET HIS DNA FROM A CIGARETTE BUTT flicked onto the rocks, right where he left me that morning. It matches the traces of his identity found all over my body. Before he left that crass genetic fingerprint behind, investigators watched as Tom Martin kept returning, over and over, to the crime scene. When Ruby made the call, when she reported Tom’s comment about ‘pictures’ and what she’d seen and heard down by the water, she hadn’t known Camera lens was fourth on Detective O’Byrne’s list of blunt force weapons, underneath the word Torch, but above Wrench and Hammer. Circled in red pen over and over, after Noah asked if