After finding disturbing journal pages that
suggest her late mother didn't die in a car accident as her father had always
maintained, Beth Walsh begins a search for answers to the question -- what
really happened to their mother? With the power and relevance of Jodi Picoult
and Lisa Jewell, Rimmer pens a provocative novel told by two women a generation
apart, the struggles they unwittingly shared, and a family mystery that may
unravel everything they believed to be true.
With her father recently moved to a care
facility because of worsening signs of dementia, Beth Walsh volunteers to clear
out the family home to prepare it for sale. Why shouldn’t she be the one, after
all? Her three siblings are all busy with their families and successful
careers, and Beth is on maternity leave after giving birth to Noah, their
miracle baby. It took her and her husband Hunter years to get pregnant, but now
that they have Noah, Beth can only feel panic. And leaving Noah with her
in-laws while she pokes about in their father’s house gives her a perfect
excuse not to have to deal with motherhood.
Beth is surprised to discover the door to
their old attic playroom padlocked, and even more shocked to see what’s behind
it – a hoarder’s mess of her father’s paintings, mounds of discarded papers,
and miscellaneous junk. Her father was the most fastidious,
everything-in-its-place man, and this chaos makes no sense. As she picks
through the clutter, she finds a handwritten note attached to one of the
paintings, in what appears to be in her late mother’s handwriting. Beth and her
siblings grew up believing Grace Walsh died in a car accident when they were
little more than toddlers, but this note suggests something much darker may be
true. A frantic search uncovers more notes, seemingly a series of loose journal
entries that paint a very disturbing portrait of a woman in profound distress,
and of a husband that bears very little resemblance to the father Beth and her
siblings know.
A fast-paced, harrowing look at the fault in
memories and the lies that can bond families together - or tear them apart.
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PROLOGUE
Grace
September 14, 1957
I am alone in a crowded family these days, and that’s
the worst feeling I’ve ever experienced. Until these past few years, I had no
idea that loneliness is worse than sadness. I’ve come to realize that’s because
loneliness, by its very definition, cannot be shared.
Tonight there are four other souls in this house, but
I am unreachably far from any of them, even as I’m far too close to guarantee
their safety. Patrick said he’d be home by nine tonight, and I clung on to that
promise all day.
He’ll be home at nine, I tell myself. You won’t do
anything crazy if Patrick is here, so just hold on until nine.
I should have known better than to rely on that man by
now. It’s 11:55 p.m., and I have no idea where he is.
Beth will be wanting a feed soon and I’m just so
tired, I’m already bracing myself—as if the sound of her cry will be the thing
that undoes me, instead of something I should be used to after four children. I
feel the fear of that cry in my very bones—a kind of whole-body tension I can’t
quite make sense of. When was the last time I had more than a few hours’ sleep?
Twenty-four hours a day I am fixated on the terror that I will snap and hurt
someone: Tim, Ruth, Jeremy, Beth…or myself. I am a threat to my children’s
safety, but at the same time, their only protection from that very same threat.
I have learned a hard lesson these past few years; the
more difficult life is, the louder your feelings become. On an ordinary day, I
trust facts more than feelings, but when the world feels like it’s ending, it’s
hard to distinguish where my thoughts are even coming from. Is this fear
grounded in reality, or is my mind playing tricks on me again? There’s no way
for me to be sure. Even the line between imagination and reality has worn down
and it’s now too thin to delineate.
Sometimes I think I will walk away before something
bad happens, as if removing myself from the equation would keep them all safe.
But then Tim will skin his knee and come running to me, as if a simple hug
could take all the world’s pain away. Or Jeremy will plant one of those sloppy
kisses on my cheek, and I am reminded that for better or worse, I am his world.
Ruth will slip my handbag over her shoulder as she follows me around the house,
trying to walk in my footsteps, because to her, I seem like someone worth
imitating. Or Beth will look up at me with that gummy grin when I try to feed
her, and my heart contracts with a love that really does know no bounds.
Those moments remind me that everything changes, and
that this cloud has come and gone twice now, so if I just hang on, it will pass
again. I don’t feel hope yet, but I should know hope, because I’ve walked this
path before and even when the mountains and valleys seemed insurmountable, I
survived them.
I’m constantly trying to talk myself around to calm,
and sometimes, for brief and beautiful moments, I do. But the hard, cold truth
is that every time the night comes, it seems blacker than it did before.
Tonight I’m teetering on the edge of something
horrific.
Tonight the sound of my baby’s cry might just be the
thing that breaks me altogether.
I’m scared of so many things these days, but most of
all now, I fear myself.
Excerpted from Truths I Never Told You by Kelly Rimmer,
Copyright © 2020 by Lantana Management Pty Ltd.
Published by Graydon House Books.
About the Author
Kelly Rimmer is the worldwide and USA TODAY
bestselling author of Before I Let You Go, Me Without You, and The Secret
Daughter. She lives in rural Australia with her husband, two children and
fantastically naughty dogs, Sully and Basil. Her novels have been translated
into more than twenty languages. Please visit her at www.Kelly.Rimmer.com
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