All the Broken People

by Leah Konen

  I retrieved my passport and my credit cards, and then, there it was.

  It was faded from years of use. Years of going to dive bars with Ellie. Of flights to Miami with Davis. Of opening my first New York City bank account and getting my apartment in Bushwick.

  For eight years, it had been well used, well loved.

  Olivia Williams. Born April 16, 1991. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Five foot seven. Of course, everyone always called me Liv, or even Livvie—or occasionally just L. Olivia had served me well, until she hadn’t. Until all had changed. I lifted up the license, setting it carefully aside.

  McKnight had done his research—he was right about that—and he’d uncovered one piece of my story, but what I could hardly believe—it surprised me so much, it made my hands shake just thinking about it—was that he’d stopped there.

  He hadn’t pushed further. He hadn’t uncovered the whole truth.

  My heart surged as I reached for the last piece of plastic, the original.

  Lucy King was blown, Olivia Williams had a court date, but this one—she was still free.

  From Washington State: Stephanie Ostlund, the name I was born with.

  I opened my wallet, and for the first time in years, I slipped Stephanie back in.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  The evergreens must have stood fifty feet tall, guarding the sides of Snoqualmie Pass like Tolkien’s Ents. Dusty whined mercilessly. Five days—and nearly three thousand miles—of driving had done little to get him used to the car. I tapped my phone to life, a new one I’d picked up at an Apple Store in Minneapolis, after retrieving the cash from my bank account. Glossy black and not cracked for the first time in what felt like ages. Fuck you, too, Davis.

  Google Maps told me I was less than an hour away from Seattle, but I knew that already. Once you reached the pass, once you smelled pine trees sweet like Christmas, followed the winding bend of road, you were nearly there.

  A pickup tailgated me. I got into the right lane, merging carefully. Reminding myself that even if I did get stopped, the plates wouldn’t be linked to me. I’d made a quick pit stop before leaving town to switch my plates with the ones on the car Vera had procured during her trip to the city, the one that still sat, undiscovered by the police, a mile from the cabin—turns out, it had come into play after all.

  The pickup sped past, and I changed lanes again.

  It’s not like I’d ever stopped wanting to be Stephanie, not like one day I woke up and said, Let me change who I am, like trying on a new outfit. Snap.

  And trust me, it wasn’t the slut-shaming that did it, either, that damn video taken and blasted across all the social networks. Even though it had circulated like wildfire all over campus, I could handle that. As well as the taunts. And the wolf whistles. And the announcements, from seemingly every guy at school—that their laps were cold and could I please warm them up if I had a minute? The awful sounds as they pretended to suck. Those things I could handle.

  It was him I couldn’t. Him, with his graphic T-shirt and his rosy cheeks and the earnest look in his eyes, every fucking day at the coffee shop on campus. Jordan Exley, telling me he was so sorry this had happened to me, that it was awful what everyone was saying, that if I ever needed someone to listen, he was there. That we should really go get coffee or tea sometime. Talk.

  He came every day, and each time he politely asked me out, and I politely said no, because if I snapped, I’d lose my job, my work-study. I’d be fucked.

  Every day he looked at me with such pity as I made his extra-hot almond milk latte. Every day he told me that he was a good listener and I should give him a chance.

  Every day, until I couldn’t listen to him anymore.

  Every day, until that one day I let myself fully open the hatch. I reached out to hand him the latte, and he tilted his head to the side, said: “Really? You’re going to reject me?”

  Without even realizing it, my hand was crunching up, popping the plastic lid off. I was throwing the drink—almond milk burned to one hundred eighty degrees—toward his smug little latte-loving face.

  His scream was instant, and so was the sweet charred smell of burning skin, and it was only due to some extremely quick thinking on my manager’s part, immediately dousing him with water from the sink, that the burns weren’t worse than they were. It was only due to my awful aim that his whole face wasn’t marred—only his neck and about two inches of his chin.

  It was only because he prided himself on being spiritual that he, against his parents’ strongest wishes, didn’t press charges against me.

  It didn’t matter to the school—or my reputation. I was expelled almost instantly, three-quarters into completing my degree. What’s more, articles were written. In the school newspaper, but other places, too. Blogs. Shitty news sites. Anyone who could gain a click or two from gossip, from a story of a skanky college girl who’d come unhinged. My name was fairly uncommon, something I’d been pleased with, when I’d decided to be a journalist, but after that day, it only made it easier to google me, instantly learn my whole sordid story.

  My parents, they should have been on my side. They should have at least cared about the harassment or the video—or any of the extenuating circumstances. But they didn’t. I had done what they’d always feared. I’d let my anger get the best of me.

  It had been a problem since I could remember. A push on the playground. A fight with my piano teacher. A tirade in middle school. Anger there, beneath the surface, always. Therapy had kept it at bay all through high school, and a counselor had taught me to do the visualizations, imagining a hatch, shutting it tight, locking it with a key, and only opening it under the proper circumstances. Boxing classes. An invigorating run around the high school track. An occasional scream into my pillow.

  But to my parents, it didn’t matter that I’d held it all back for so long, that I’d learned to adapt to a world where anger—or female anger, at least—wasn’t allowed. Every day that I’d kept the hatch closed no longer counted once I’d gone and done this. All my mom could say, over and over again, was: Why’d you have to go and ruin your future? After all we tried to do for you. And my dad’s version, a bit more succinct: Somehow, after everything, you found a way to fuck it all up. Then he’d reminded me that I should have been happy that someone wanted to date me at all, with that video circling around.

  It’s not that my parents weren’t loving. They were, in their way. They’d made me soup when I was sick, taken me to the park, enrolled me in art classes, found a therapist for my issues—all of it.

  Only, I was sure, after that day, that it had all been conditional. They’d wanted me to be their perfect daughter, and they’d spent loads of money trying to contain the monster inside me.

  Once it was out, for everyone to see, they were as disgusted with me as I was with myself.

  I shook my head, pushing Stephanie aside for a moment as I made another turn, deeper into the pass, the trees even thicker now as Dusty whined on.

  My parents had seen the worst of me, they had judged me, and their love for me, it had seemed to dissipate completely—I could see it in their eyes—so I left.

  I emptied the trust my grandmother had set up for me before she died, the one I’d been saving for moving after college—twenty thousand bucks—and went to New York. I knew it would be impossible to get a job in my state, especially in a competitive field like journalism—any potential employer who googled me would see that I’d been expelled, be able to read article after article about me—I knew, more than anything, that I needed a fresh start. I was a computer science minor. It wasn’t difficult to purchase a new identity on the dark web if you knew where to look. The full package: ID, health insurance info, Social Security number and everything, it only cost a couple thousand bucks, less than the price of a used car. It wasn’t foolproof, but if you were careful, if you didn’t try to steal money or open a ton of credit ca
rds, it was easy enough to get by on someone else’s name.

  In the city, in a roach-infested room-share in Williamsburg that cost nine hundred a month and was presented to me as a very good deal, I started my new life.

  I hadn’t intended to lie about my parents, only my roommate, she couldn’t stop going on and on about hers, how they were so supportive of her move to New York, how their dream was for her to be an artist, how they were coming to visit from Kansas in just another month.

  When she’d asked me about mine, I’d blurted it out quickly: “They’re gone.”

  “Oh my god,” she’d said, her bottom lip jutting into a pout. “You’re all alone?”

  I nodded, understanding exactly what she’d assumed, not daring to correct her. It was a better story, I realized, than what I knew was true—that they didn’t love me, wouldn’t look at me the same way anymore.

  Eventually, questions were asked, and a story bloomed from nothing. They’d died in an accident, during college. In a way, it hadn’t been entirely untrue. They had died a little that day I tossed almond milk in Jordan Exley’s face. I had, too. What we’d had as a family had died, at least.

  In Brooklyn, I carried on as I would have if I’d graduated. I made up a résumé for the delightfully common and difficult-to-google Olivia Williams, including a journalism degree from my would-be alma mater, University of Washington, and an internship at the indie newspaper there, the Stranger.

  Most editors—so busy worrying about the death of journalism and the impending loss of their jobs—didn’t even check. They believed what I had printed on eggshell paper from the copy shop on Bedford Avenue. I’d taken most of the courses, I told them I always traveled with my pocket copy of The Elements of Style, and they bought it.

  There was one woman who didn’t believe me, that bitch at Vogue—it had taken every bone in my body to keep the hatch shut during that interview—but she was only one editor. There were others. There would always be more people to lie to, to fool. Honestly, I would have stayed Liv my whole life if I could have.

  Only then, there was Davis.

  Davis, who turned my fresh start into a veritable living hell. Who punished me, physically, mentally, and emotionally. It was no wonder it eventually got to me in a way I couldn’t control.

  It was after he showed up at my hotel in May, Ellie in tow, that I realized I might need to get creative. After he told me he’d never, ever let me leave, that if I did, he’d find a way to take away everything I ever cared about, including Dusty, that I began to realize I might have to start over . . . again.

  I was all set to leave, quietly in the night, Lucy King’s brand-new ID tucked into my wallet. But then, just a couple of days before I’d planned to go, Davis had come at me, after a dinner out, going on and on, berating me about all the guys I’d flirted with at the bar we’d gone to after, guys I hadn’t so much as looked at, that paranoid prick.

  And like that, the hatch opened again.

  I grabbed the bottle of good whiskey we always kept on our counter and . . .

  Smash.

  My first instinct had been to dial 911, but I ended the call quickly, tossing my phone against the brick wall. Then I’d used the bottle of whiskey to give myself the bruise, and I’d left him passed out on the hardwood floor of our apartment. I’d taken Dusty, taken my bags, and gone.

  I’d spent those first few weeks half-afraid he’d find me and half-afraid of something even worse.

  That the police would find me. That I just might have left him for dead.

  That’s why the bruise was necessary. Self-defense, if anyone ever asked, since I’d been too stupid to capture any of the bruises before. Blackmail, if he insisted on trying to control me still—that was, if he didn’t kill me first.

  I took another turn, leaving the pass, and the trees, behind. I was getting closer to the city, and the sky was bluer than it should be in Seattle and speckled with clouds.

  I knew it now, clear as the sky above me. I never should have offered to help Vera and John. Only, I’d still been afraid Davis would come after me. I was afraid my haphazard attempt at blackmail had only made him madder. And more than anything, I couldn’t bear the thought of starting over again. Of losing the people I loved so dearly. The people who I’d naively trusted to love me more unconditionally than my parents.

  Of course, I’d managed to lose them both anyway.

  Like my dad said, I somehow found a way to fuck it up.

  It was another fifteen minutes before I pulled up to the street on the edge of North Seattle, before I found myself staring at the yellow siding, only lightly weathered, and the white trim, which looked recently painted.

  I pulled the car into the driveway, behind a newer-model Subaru than they’d had before.

  Leaving Dusty in the car, I climbed the stone steps with heavy feet.

  I took a deep breath. I was done with all that now.

  Lucy’s friends were dead. Olivia’s friends were well behind her. And that wasn’t even taking into account the legal obligations, the court date I would never, ever, ever show up for.

  In some ways, I had been pummeling toward rock bottom for years, but now I had finally, indisputably, hit it.

  I didn’t want to lie anymore. I didn’t want to be that person. I wanted to find a way not to think about all the awful things I’d already done.

  In the aftermath of all that had happened in college, I’d believed my parents didn’t love me anymore—that they never would again. But I knew how much I’d missed them over the years, in spite of myself. I knew how much I craved my family even if I hated them for how they’d reacted. It had been impossible not to wonder if I had blown up my life too quickly, too easily. If they would have come around had I given them a chance.

  So now I was giving them another chance, and I prayed, against all odds, that they’d take it. I prayed that I’d been wrong, that their love hadn’t been conditional after all.

  I rapped on the door three times.

  After a moment, it swung open, and it smelled, suddenly, of turkey tetrazzini, the same recipe I’d made for Vera and John one night, the one Davis had loved, too.

  Her hair was all gray now, her lips coated in pale pink, her earrings pearlescent and heart-wrenchingly familiar.

  Behind her, he appeared, his eyes widening at the sight of me. His hair was whiter, his wrinkles deeper—a map across his face of the years I’d missed.

  “Stephanie?” he asked.

  “My god,” she said. “It’s you.”

  I swallowed back my pride, my lies, and the anger I knew was always lying in wait, bubbling steadily and eager to come out if I let it, and I stared at this woman, fifty-six years old now and beautiful as ever. At this man, looking at me like I was no more than a child.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said. “Dad. It’s me.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A huge thanks to all the people who made this book possible.

  To my incredible agent, Elisabeth Weed, thank you for believing in this story through every twist and turn. Your storytelling know-how and wild, spur-of-the-moment brainstorming sessions made the book what it is today. You are the absolute best person to have in my corner, and you’ve given me the perfect gift, the ability to do what I love full-time. And thanks so much to all of your team who gave me additional reads, especially Hallie Schaeffer, whose early notes were spot-on.

  To Margo Lipschultz, Sally Kim, and the entire Putnam team, I can’t thank you all enough for falling in love with this story and fighting for it. Margo, from our very first phone call, I knew we were a perfect editorial match. Your notes and guidance helped me uncover Lucy’s voice and her purpose in this story—you got exactly what I was going for and helped me bring it all to life. And enormous thanks for reading this book again and again (and again!) as I tried to find a way to balance the production schedule with a new ba
by.

  To Joel Richardson and everyone at Michael Joseph, I am so thankful for all the editorial and marketing work across the pond. Joel, you helped me set the pace of this novel and were instrumental in seeding twist after twist. After personally loving so many British thriller writers, it’s such an honor to know this book has a home on your shelves.

  To Jenny Meyer and your rock-star team, I am beyond thankful for the care you’ve taken in pitching this book around the globe—each sale has been such a thrill. Thank you so much for helping get it into the hands of as many readers as possible.

  To Michelle Weiner and everyone at CAA, all I can say is our phone calls have been some of the craziest pinch-me moments of my writing career. Thank you so much for working so hard to find this book a great TV home. And to Marc Webb, CBS Television, Mark Martin, and the entire team at Black Lamb, I am so happy that the book has landed in your very capable hands.

  No one writes in a vacuum, and I am forever grateful to my two superstar beta readers, Andrea Bartz and Danielle Rollins. Andi, thanks for all the many, many park walks and frantic phone calls it took to make this story what it is today. Danielle, your eye for plot and pacing is unmatched. And to everyone else who read the book in an early form, including Robin Bruns Worona, Kate Lord, and Julia Bartz, I am so thankful.

  I’ve been lucky to have been surrounded by people who encouraged me to write all my life. A very special thank you to my parents, who never tried to get me to pursue a more practical career and have been my biggest cheerleaders with each new development. And an extra special thank you to my sister, Kimberly, whose guidance and notes have been instrumental in nearly every one of my books.

  Finally, to Thomas, for all your support and believing in me all these years, and for taking the leap of buying a house with me in beautiful upstate New York—there is no way I could have written this book without you. To my number-one coworker, my dog, Farley, you are the best emotional support a writer could ever have. And to Eleanor, thank you for coming into our lives exactly when you did.