I miss Sewickley’s charm and walkability, Pittsburgh’s rolling hills and its rivers and bridges. Most of all, I miss my closest friends and the bond we once shared, which I know we’ll never have again. For the first few months after the move, I kept in touch with Julie and Sarah, but then it stretched out longer and longer, and the other day I realized that it had been over six months since I’d spoken to either of them. It’s been said that a shared trauma can bring people together, but just as often it pulls them apart.
Sarah did end up joining AA, and soon after that she went back to practicing law full-time. She and her husband are selling their house in Sewickley and moving back to the city. Perhaps they already have. Ostensibly, it’s to be closer to her law practice, but I wonder if she needed to get away as much as I did. Apparently she spends all her free time doing pro bono work, so much so that the Tribune-Review wrote a nice article about her, highlighting her “selfless fight for the rights of the underprivileged and underrepresented.” I think I know what fuels this obsession with justice.
Julie is still selling houses. There was a slight dip in her home sales after the murder, but she rebounded from that and has gone on to enjoy an even greater level of success than before, a fact that she apparently credits to a religious experience in some way connected to Heather’s death. She told me about it once, how she’d been afraid that Ray would turn the knife on her after Heather and how she’d held on to her belief that this wasn’t the plan. It’s an interesting spin on that story, I told her, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice, but I don’t know why I was surprised. Wasn’t she always afraid to look at the dark side of anything? Maybe she holds on to her beliefs because she thinks they will save her. And perhaps they will. All I can say is that I don’t share that certainty.
Here is what I know: We helped to kill a man. We might not have pulled the trigger, but we set the events in motion and placed the weapon in Heather’s hand. Will we be judged for what we did and didn’t do? Certainly I have judged myself for it. Sometimes I still have nightmares about it, seeing his body slumped over the passenger seat or lying in his casket. Once I had a dream in which I was back in Braddock, wandering through the house where I’d lived as a child, the same thin walls and hollow doors, but it was Viktor bleeding on that old linoleum floor, and as I ran to help him I caught my reflection in a window, but the face staring back at me was my father’s.
The letters still make their way to my mailbox, my father’s handwriting shakier now and his observations less acute. “I saw a movie last week that reminded me of you,” he wrote a month ago. “There were two little kids in it and I thought of you and Sean. Do you remember running through that sprinkler I set up for you?”
He isn’t the monster I remember. There are no monsters, just deeply flawed people, all of us given that power to choose, some of us making choices so damaging that they ruin the lives of those we claim to love.
I believed once in those clear lines, the good and the evil, the perpetrator and the victim, and now I see that all of us end up playing both roles at some point in our lives. We hurt those that we love, we make choices that we can’t undo, we throw ourselves headlong into battles in the name of rescuing people who never asked to be saved. Not everyone is as guilty as my father, or Heather, or Ray. But none of us are wholly innocent. We are all the damned and we are all the saved.
Could we have saved Heather? In my grief over her death, I’ve asked myself this question many times. If she’d only left Viktor instead of having an affair. If she hadn’t been attracted to such a damaged man or put so much value on money. If we’d only realized how lonely she was and taken her away from that stone house on the hill, just as we’d thought of doing so many times. But you can’t save those who don’t want to be saved.
This was true of my mother, and for all those caught like her, who keep going back for the embrace that is a stranglehold, like the fragile and frantic moths that find their way to my back porch on summer evenings, doomed to turn their bodies again and again toward the light that will destroy them.
I walk my kids to the bus stop in our new neighborhood, bringing something to read just like I used to all those years ago when Lucy started preschool. This morning, after the bus pulled away, another mother called after me as I started for home. “We were thinking of going for coffee,” she said with a lovely smile. “Why don’t you join us?”
I hesitated, memories of those mornings at the coffee shop in Sewickley filling me with a longing so great that tears sprang to my eyes. But I could feel the weight of the latest letter in my pocket, and the email Sean sent was fresh in my mind. He’s offered to meet me at the prison hospital, but when it’s time, I’ll walk into that room alone to face my father.
“I can’t today.” I smiled at the welcoming faces of the woman and her friend. “Maybe another time,” I said, and kept walking.
Acknowledgments
A special thank-you to the Village of Sewickley and its many charming businesses, especially the Crazy Mocha Coffee Company and the Penguin Bookshop. And thank you to my dear friends Heather Terrell, Mark Garvey, and Kathryn Jackson, residents who’ve shared their love and knowledge of Sewickley with me.
Local readers will notice that I’ve created names and places that don’t exist in the region, and amalgams of places that do, including Sewickley Elementary School, which is a composite of the two public elementary schools in the area. I hope readers will still recognize the Village, the Heights, and the ’Burgh in these pages.
To try to convey the complexity of abusive relationships, I relied on many sources, including the National Domestic Violence Hotline (thehotline.org) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office on Women’s Health (womenshealth.gov), which offer excellent resources for identifying and ending the cycle of abuse.
Many thanks to my lovely and talented agent, Rachel Ekstrom, and all the wonderful people at the Irene Goodman Literary Agency. And thank you to my two great editors, Melanie Fried and Holly Ingraham, and to the fantastic team at St. Martin’s Press; I’m honored to be one of your authors.
This is a story about female friendship, and I’m privileged to be friends with many incredible women. Thank you to all of my many writing pals, including Meredith Mileti, Lila Shaara, Nancy Martin, Nicole Peeler, Kathryn Miller Haines, Heather Terrell, Kathleen George, Annette Dashofy, Gwyn Cready, Meryl Neiman, and Shelly Culbertson.
And thank you to my walking and book club pals, including Lisa Lundy, Mary Lou Linton-Morningstar, Sharon Wolpert, Marilyn Fitzgerald, Becky Mator, Ann Paulini, Eun-Joung Lee, Shabnam Mirchandani, and Susan Moore.
A special thank-you to Donna Wallace and Lisa Bartunek for being early readers and champions of this book.
And finally, heartfelt thanks to my lovely and talented daughter, Maggie, for being such a great sounding board and editor for this book. Thank you also and always to my two Joes, for your amazing love and support. I’m so lucky to have you all.
ALSO BY REBECCA DRAKE
Don’t Be Afraid
The Next Killing
The Dead Place
Only Ever You
About the Author
Rebecca Drake’s four previous novels are Only Ever You, Don’t Be Afraid, The Next Killing, and The Dead Place. A graduate of Penn State, Rebecca is an instructor in Seton Hill University’s Writing Popular Fiction M.F.A. program. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with her husband and two children.
More about Rebecca can be found at RebeccaDrake.com or readers can connect with her on Facebook at facebook.com/rebecca.drake.writer, and on Twitter @AuthorRDrake. Or sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Acknowledgments
Also by Rebecca Drake
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
JUST BETWEEN US. Copyright © 2017 by Rebecca Drake. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Ervin Serrano
Cover photographs: woman © Elisabeth Ansley/Arcangel; curtain © Pang Zim Yee/EyeEm/Getty Images
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-16720-0 (trade paperback)
ISBN 978-1-4668-7771-9 (ebook)
eISBN 9781466877719
Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected].
First Edition: January 2018
Just Between Us Page 36
