Keep Your Friends Close - Softcover

Konen, Leah

 
9780593544723: Keep Your Friends Close
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593544722 ISBN 13: 9780593544723
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

How well do you know your friends?

Isolated and embroiled in a custody battle, Mary is desperate for a friend. So when she meets the charming and enigmatic Willa at a Brooklyn playground, their connection feels fated. But during a margarita-fueled moms’ night out, Mary shares her darkest secret about her ex, George, and the next morning Willa simply disappears. No calls, no texts, nothing.

Two months later, Mary’s divorce is almost finalized, and she’s trying to build a new life for her son in upstate New York. On her first day in town, she runs into Willa . . . only Willa’s name is now Annie, and she’s got an entirely new family in tow. When George turns up dead and Mary becomes the prime suspect, she has no choice but to turn to her only friend in town: Willa.

As coincidences—and evidence—pile up, Mary begins to wonder whether Willa had something to do with George’s death. Is the woman a friend or a foe, a confidante or just a con? Mary must uncover the truth before she loses everything.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Leah Konen is the author of the thrillers Keep Your Friends Close, You Should Have Told Me, The Perfect Escape, and All the Broken People and of several young adult novels, including Love and Other Train Wrecks and The Romantics. Her books have been published in nearly a dozen countries, and her essays and articles have appeared in Marie Claire, Vogue, and more. She lives in Brooklyn and Saugerties, New York, with her husband; their daughters, Eleanor and Mary Joyce; and their dog, Farley.

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1

NOW

Saturday, August 14

Woodstock, New York

If you came back now, you'd never have to worry about losing him.

Would you?

My soon-to-be-ex-husband's texts sent a tickle up my spine, crawling like a spider, vertebra by vertebra, until the feeling exploded down my shoulders, making goose bumps rise in spite of the warm mountain air breezing through the open window. Why was George talking like this now, after he and I had finally reached our tentative verbal agreement regarding custody of our two-year-old?

I flipped the notifications away and checked my latest text from George's mom, Ruth, instead. There was little Alex, happy and sandy, on the Haywoods' massive porch in Montauk. Immediately, I felt that typical mother pull-the desire for a little space from your kid at war with your primal instinct to be hugging on them, wiping their boogers, and popping Cheerios into their tiny little mouths at all times. It was strange to be so far away from Alex for a whole week, like my left limb had been abandoned hundreds of miles away, but I knew it was necessary. I needed this time to get everything together.

I sent a heart-eyes emoji back to Ruth and set my phone on the rough-hewn wooden countertop, just as the bartender, a twenty-something woman with blunt-cut bangs, a septum piercing, and a wreath of ivy inked across her shoulder, put my plate before me.

"It's hot," she said as she pushed it an inch or so toward me. "Watch your fingers. Refill?" She pointed to my glass, empty apart from sudsy foam crawling up the side.

"Why not?" I smiled, and she traded one glass for another, which she filled from a tap behind her, then set another draught of amber-yellow liquid in front of me. The beer in question was a locally sourced Saison, hinted with citrus and low on alcohol content, my preference in the two years since I'd had Alex. My Sunday night margaritas with my former best friend, Willa-extra salt, no kids-had been my only real exception.

I took a sip, and the bartender ran a rag over each tap, then turned back to me. "You up here just for the weekend?"

"Oh," I said, setting my drink down. To this day, I still got nerves striking up a conversation with someone new, especially someone who seemed as cool and self-assured as this girl did, unless it was for a story and I had a notepad or a tape recorder in hand. "Er, the week, actually, but I just got in. I came straight here."

"Good choice," she said. She glanced around the place, a bar-slash-café that was caught between the lunch and dinner rushes and empty apart from a guy reading the paper in the corner. "From the city?"

"Technically, yes," I said. "Brooklyn. But I'm actually originally from the Adirondacks area. Old Forge."

"Cool," she said. "I'm from around here, but I have a cousin up there. Bit of a different vibe, isn't it?"

"That's an understatement," I said with a laugh. "Feels like it's nothing but city people up here now."

"Right?" the girl said. "But hey, good for business, at least."

I smiled politely, then took a bite of my burger, topped with a fried egg. Yellow ooze ran down the side of the bun, and I wiped my finger with a napkin, just as the girl pushed an extra stack my way. Through the window, I took in the view of downtown Woodstock, a crunchy-chic mountain town smack-dab between the city and my hometown of Old Forge. Clear blue skies on top. A stretch of shops, selling everything from crystals to comfort shoes, on the bottom; the outline of the Catskill Mountains sandwiched in between. Most people saw something charming, a storybook-after all, even the name of Woodstock's main downtown strip was quaint-Tinker Street-as if a child with a set of wooden blocks and interlocking train tracks had made it up after their lunchtime nap. But for me, between the hippies and hipsters, tarot card readers and twee dog breeds, it was hard to see anything but the city, spreading its tendrils wide.

Even after years living there, I always felt like I had to be on in Brooklyn, and I feared Woodstock would be no different, but I didn't really have a choice-George would never let me take Alex back up to Old Forge, but he had finally agreed to let our son split his time between Brooklyn and here.

"You still have family up in the Adirondacks?" the bartender asked.

I chewed quickly, surprised she wanted to keep talking, but not unhappy about it. "My mom and sister," I said, picturing Mom in the lounge chair she'd reupholstered three times, her leg propped on a floral ottoman-she was homebound for the next six weeks with a severely broken ankle. I felt awful not being there to help her, but Rachel, my sister, was staying with her, at least. They were probably eating Craisins and watching bad reality TV right now, and my heart swelled. God, I missed them. My life with George had been so very different than theirs, and it had made it hard, sometimes, to truly connect. But all that was changing now.

"So what brought you down, then?" the bartender prompted. "Tired of peanut-shell-covered dive bars?"

"No," I said with a laugh. "I mean, don't get me wrong, the beer is better here and in the city, but I never really minded. I wanted to be a journalist. And at the time, to do that, you really had to move to the city."

"And did you do it? Become a journalist?" she asked, using a rag to work at a single errant stain on an otherwise immaculate bar top.

"I did," I said.

Her eyebrows shot up. "Have I read anything of yours?"

"Maybe," I said. "My biggest bylines were The Atlantic, Forbes. Glamour, when it used to be in print. But that was a while ago now . . . I got married, had a baby. It's been years since I wrote anything of substance, but I'm trying to get back to it."

The girl nodded. "So where's the fam now?"

"Oh," I said, caught off guard. "Well, I'm actually planning on moving here . . . er, with my son. That's why I'm up. My hus-" I paused, took a quick breath. "My soon-to-be-ex-husband, he's staying in the city, and my family, like I said, is up in Old Forge, but that's too far for me to take my son. Woodstock is close enough between the two places so our toddler can split time between both. So I'm here to see about securing a rental, getting a daycare spot, while my kid is with my in-laws for the week. It's tricky, working everything out like this, but I don't really have a choice."

I stopped talking, felt my face redden. I didn't want to overshare. Not again.

The girl only scratched at her ivy tattoo, apparently unalarmed by my info dump. "Soon-to-be-ex-husband," she said. "I've got one of those, too. Pain in my ass."

"Oh, you do?" She looked far too young to be married, much less have an ex. "But no kids, right?"

"No," she said. "Thank god." She bit her lip. "Sorry. It just seems messier. At least all we really had to fight about was the brand-new Xbox."

"It is messier," I said, skin prickling at the thought of George's texts. After my leaving in February and a spring spent dealing with George's threats to take Alex away from me, my ex had finally cooled down over the summer, agreeing to this Woodstock plan. The texts were nothing more than a last-ditch attempt to throw me. They had to be.

I looked down at my plate, popped a fry into my mouth. It still surprised me that I was up here at all. The downfall of my marriage had been slow, like a house that badly needs an update-cracks in the foundation, popped floorboards-but then fast, like said house had been struck by a hurricane, flooded beyond repair. And I'd been dealing with it all on my own. I felt awful complaining about my problems to my mom and Rachel, when they were always struggling with money and I was practically rolling in it; and my beloved sister-in-law, Cassandra,...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593544722
ISBN 13 
9780593544723
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
384
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
49078
Deutschland

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Softcover