The Truth and Lies of Ella Black

by Emily Barr

  It was getting worse. I wanted to lash out and I was so scared that I was actually going to hurt someone else, that people would see the real me and everyone would hate me. It would happen at school and I would fight myself to control it and I know I would have failed, in the end.

  And then it happened. I lashed out at you, Fiona, and then I hurt the man in the café. I will feel terrible about that for the rest of my life. The fact that you forgave me at once without question is a testament to the people you are. It really is. For what it’s worth, I am so so sorry.

  Then when I was alone in Rio I used Bella’s strength to get me through. She and I worked together. It’s not always straightforward, but finding out the truth about myself has helped me pull the two sides of myself together. I feel like myself, now. I’ve never felt that before.

  So – I do think of you in Kent, and I do miss you, and I would like to see you. I’m not ready to come back, but could we meet next year, maybe?

  Lots of love,

  Ella xx

  Nineteen Years Earlier

  Fiona was trying to concentrate. She realized she had drawn a weird, rambling picture without meaning to: she was just sitting, waiting, and her doodle had taken on a life of its own. It had covered a whole sheet of paper. It was lines and flowers and then trees and birds and cats and waves and beaches. She was drawing everything that wasn’t a baby thing. It was a strange sprawling mess that covered the paper she was supposed to keep by the phone so she could make notes if the call ever came.

  Everything was riding on this. She felt certain it was their last chance. She was thirty-five and that wasn’t old. Everyone said that. You’re still young, they said, as if eight miscarriages counted for nothing. She had given up on that now. It wouldn’t work. Her body didn’t work. She was not going to have her own baby. That was beyond any doubt.

  There was a dark voice inside her that told her it was all her fault, that wanted to make her go out and do terrible things to make everyone see how messed up she was. She ignored that voice as best she could, but it had been difficult over the years. Sometimes she had to shut herself away and let it all out.

  But that had finished now. She was going to give a home to a baby that needed one. Or a child; everyone knew that you hardly ever got a baby. She and Graham had been through so much together, and she was constantly crippled by the thought that he could leave her and have a family with someone else, with someone whose body did work properly; someone who did not have secret horrible thoughts. But he hadn’t done that, and he said he never would and she knew he was telling the truth. They were solid. That was one thing Fiona didn’t worry about.

  Today, though, there had been talk of a baby. That was why she was sitting by the phone. That was why she was drawing and staring and waiting. That was why she had cleaned the house from top to bottom and done everything else she could think of until she had run out of jobs. That was why she was just gazing at the phone, waiting for something that might never happen.

  If they got this child she would look after him or her forever. She would feed them healthy food and make sure they had everything they needed. They would send their child to a good school and make sure they were always warm, never hungry, always safe. She would do everything for this baby. He or she would always be happy and nothing bad would ever happen.

  The phone rang.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you so much to Ruth Knowles for being the most amazing editor. All the teams at PRH, in editorial, foreign rights, publicity, production, design: I am incredibly lucky to have you all on my side and am in awe of everything you do.

  Enormous thanks to Steph Thwaites at Curtis Brown for the constant support and brilliance.

  Thanks to Colin Ramsay and Conor Foley for different types of technical help.

  Thank you to Kat Pieper and everyone at Project Favela in Rocinha for welcoming us in and letting us spend time in your classes, then answering lots of questions. The Favela English School of this novel is entirely fictional but visiting you helped me ground it, in some ways, in reality.

  At home, Craig Green makes it possible for me to get these books written, with constant support, love and coffee.

  FRAGMENTS OF THE LOST

  by Megan Miranda

  New York Times bestselling author of All the Missing Girls and The Perfect Stranger

  Jessa Whitworth knows she doesn’t belong in her ex-boyfriend Caleb’s room. But she can’t deny that she’s everywhere – in his photos, his neatly folded T-shirts, even the dragonfly necklace in his jeans pocket … the one she gave him for safe keeping on that day.

  His mother has asked her to pack up his things – even though she blames Jessa for his accident. How can she say no? And maybe, just maybe, it will help her work through the guilt she feels about their final moments together.

  But as Jessa begins to box up the pieces of Caleb’s life, they trigger memories that make Jessa realize their past relationship may not be exactly as she remembered. And she starts to question whether she really knew Caleb at all …

  Read on for a sneak preview …

  A Blue Door

  There’s no light in the narrow stairway to the third floor. There’s no handrail, either. Just wooden steps and plaster walls that were probably added in an attic renovation long ago. The door above remains shut, but there’s a sliver of light that escapes through the bottom, coming from inside. He must’ve left the window uncovered.

  The door looks darker than the walls of the stairway, but it’s hard to tell from this angle, without light, that it’s blue. We painted it during the summer from a half-empty can he’d found in the garage, a color called Rustic Sea.

  “A complicated color for a complicated door,” he joked. But it turned out to look more like denim than anything else.

  He stepped back after applying the first stroke, wrinkled his nose, wiped the back of his hand against his forehead. “My feelings on this color are also very complicated.”

  There was a smudge of Rustic Sea over his left eye. “I love it,” I said.

  I reach for the door now, and I can almost smell the fresh paint, feel the summer breeze coming in from the open window to help air it out. We painted it all the way around—front and back and sides—and sometimes, the door still sticks when you pull it open. Like the paint dried too thick, too slowly.

  There’s a speck of paint on the silver doorknob that I’ve never noticed before, and it makes me pause. I run my thumb over the roughness of the spot, wondering how I missed this.

  I take a slow breath, trying to remember the room before I see it, to prepare.

  It’s got four walls, a closet, slanting ceilings before they meet at a flat strip overtop. There’s a fan hanging from the middle of that strip, the kind that rattles when it’s set to the highest speed. Shelves built into the walls on both sides, giving way to a sliding closet door on my left. A single window, on the far wall.

  There’s a bed, with a green comforter.

  A desk to my right, with a computer monitor on the surface, the tower hidden below.

  The walls are gray and the carpet is … the carpet is brown. I think. I’m no longer sure. The color blurs and shifts in my mind.

  It’s just a room. Any room. Four walls and a ceiling and a fan.

  This is what I tell myself before I step inside. This is the whisper I hear in my head as I stand with my hand on the knob, waiting on the top step.

  For a moment, I think I hear his footsteps on the other side of the door, but I know this isn’t possible. I picture us sitting across from each other on the floor. My legs, angled between his.

  He leans closer. He’s smiling.

  Then I remember: the carpet is beige. The door will squeak as I push it open. The air will be hotter or colder than the rest of the house, depending on the time of year.

  All these things I know by heart.

  None of this prepares me.

  Saturday Morning

  His mother asked me t
o do this, because she said it wasn’t something a mother should ever have to do. I don’t think it’s really something an ex-girlfriend should have to do either, but mother trumps ex any day of the week.

  “The room is full of you, Jessa,” she explained, by which she means the pictures. They’re taped around the room, directly to the gray slanting walls, and in all of them I have my arms looped around his neck, or his arms draped over my shoulders from behind me. I can’t even look directly at the photos, but his mother is right. I’m everywhere.

  Sometimes I wonder if his mother knows about the ex part. If he told her, if she overheard, if she could tell all on her own. Though something about the way she stands at the base of the stairway watching me linger at the entrance to the attic room, something about the way she asked me to do this in the first place, makes me think that she does.

  There’s a chill up here, but I know it’s nothing more than the poor insulation of a converted attic, heat escaping through the cracks of the window frame, the November air seeping in from the outside.

  His clothes are still on the floor, however they fell when he last kicked them off, on that rainy day in mid-September. His bed is unmade. His computer monitor sits black on the desk, my distorted reflection looking back. His desk is stuffed full with ticket stubs and old homework, and more, I know, and so is the closet. Caleb wouldn’t want his mother doing this, either. Under the bed, between the mattresses, there are things a mother shouldn’t see. My stomach rebels, but I can feel her still watching, so I step inside.

  I don’t know where to start.

  I don’t know how to start.

  If Caleb were here, he’d say, Just start.

  I hated that, the way he’d brush aside everything else, forcing the point, or the issue, or this moment.

  Just forget about it—

  Just leave it—

  Just say it—

  Just pick up the shirt at the foot of the bed, the one he wore the last time you touched him.

  Just start.

  Dragonfly Necklace

  The shirt still smells of him. Dove soap. The cologne that always let me know when he was behind me, a smile starting even before he’d place his hand on my waist, his lips on my cheek. I don’t bring it to my face. I don’t dare bring it any closer. I throw it into the corner—the beginning of a pile.

  See, Caleb? I’m starting. I’ve started.

  Underneath the shirt, there’s also the jeans. Knees worn thin, hem slightly fraying, soft and familiar. I’m holding my breath by the time I get to the pockets, except I already know what’s there, so it should prepare me. But it doesn’t. The chain crackles, cold on my fingers. And then I feel something else: the memory of his warm skin as I placed it into his open palm.

  I said: Please hold this for me.

  I said: Please be careful.

  He put it in his pocket, no big thing. He did it like that because of everyone watching. To show me he didn’t have to be careful anymore. Not with me.

  The clasp of the necklace in my hand is broken, had already broken when I gave it to him, but the gold chain is now kinked and knotted too, from sitting buried in his pocket. I wore it every race, even though we weren’t supposed to, taping the dragonfly charm to the inside of my jersey to keep it in place while I ran. I wore it because it was good luck, because it was a ritual, because I had a hard time doing things any other way than how I’d always done them.

  It broke on the starting line as I raised my hands over my head in a stretch. The pop against my skin, sickening. My body already wound tight, waiting for the gun. I scanned the crowd, and there he was—familiar. It didn’t occur to me right then that he had no reason to be there anymore. It didn’t even register. There was no mystery, just the momentary panic of a broken necklace and a race about to start.

  Wait, I begged, leaving my place on the field. I jogged over to him, standing near the starting line, as everyone else took their places.

  Please hold this for me.

  Please be careful.

  He frowned at the dragonfly in the crease of his palm, closed his fist, slid his hand into the right front pocket of his favorite jeans. Shrugged.

  I wish I had known that this would be it—the last time I saw him. I would’ve made sure the last image I had of him was not like this: this apathy; his blue eyes skimming over me, settling to the side; and then the breeze, blowing his light brown hair across his eyes, shuttering everything. The image I see constantly, now burned into memory.

  He left before the race was over, probably remembering he didn’t have to be there for me anymore. Or maybe it was something else. The rain. A word spoken. A thing remembered. Either way, he left. Came back home. Tossed his jeans on the floor of his room, my necklace still inside. Left them there. Changed.

  Changed everything.

  Caleb. Be careful.

  The attic is too quiet without him, and the angled walls too narrowed, and I want to be out of this room, but then I hear his mother arguing below. She’s arguing with someone very particular. She’s arguing with Max. Sometimes his voice reminds me of Caleb’s. Sometimes, when I hear him, it takes me a second to remember Caleb’s gone.

  “She shouldn’t be here,” he’s saying. “I told you I’d do it.”

  “She will do it,” his mother says.

  And this is how I’m sure that this is my penance.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia

  India | New Zealand | South Africa

  Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  www.penguin.co.uk

  www.puffin.co.uk

  www.ladybird.co.uk

  Digital edition first published 2017

  Text copyright © Emily Barr, 2017

  Extract from The Fragments of the Lost copyright © Megan Miranda, 2017

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Cover image © Runrun2/Shutterstock.com

  ISBN: 978-0-141-36701-9