The Split: A Novel - Hardcover

Frick, Kit

 
9781668022474: The Split: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1668022478 ISBN 13: 9781668022474
Verlag: Atria/Emily Bestler Books, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

“It’s great fun to watch [Kit] Frick’s two narratives collide and diverge.” —The New York Times Book Review
An Elle Best Mystery and Thriller Book of 2024

From critically acclaimed author Kit Frick, this “storytelling feat, with twin narratives that race each other to a satisfying—and shocking—conclusion” (Riley Sager, New York Times bestselling author), follows a pair of sisters into a family’s dark past, illuminating how a single choice can drastically alter the trajectory of a life.

Sisters Jane and Esme used to be thick as thieves. But as adults, pragmatic, dependable Jane regrets the distance that has grown between them. So when beautiful and impetuous Esme calls Jane during a flash summer storm, announcing she’s left her high society husband, Jane is shocked to learn that her little sister wishes to stay with her. Could this be an opportunity for them to become close again? The only catch: Esme needs a ride from the city to their small Connecticut hometown, and Jane is terrified of getting on the highway. The storm is raging, and Jane can’t escape the horrible memory of how she nearly killed Esme while driving in a downpour when they were teens.

Jane must either let Esme stand on her own two feet for once or swallow her fear and jump to her younger sister’s rescue—and her choice cleaves her life in two.

In one reality, Jane tells Esme to crash with a friend. Twenty-four hours later, her sister is missing. Tortured by regret, Jane dedicates herself to piecing together Esme’s life before her disappearance, unraveling a web of lies, broken relationships, and, finally, the truth.

In the other reality, Jane gets in the car and offers her less-than-grateful sister a ride. But while Jane hopes living together in their childhood home will be healing, Esme is aloof and increasingly reckless. The tension between the sisters builds until they are finally forced to reckon with the explosive secret from their past that could destroy their fragile bond—and both their lives.

With a breakneck pace and shocking twists and turns, The Split captivatingly explores how little we know the ones we love—and how one small choice can change everything.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kit Frick is a MacDowell Fellow and International Thriller Writers Award finalist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She studied creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and received her MFA from Syracuse University. She is the author of the adult suspense novels The Split and Friends and Liars, the young adult thrillers Before We Were Sorry (originally published as See All the Stars), All Eyes on Us, I Killed Zoe Spanos, Very Bad People, and The Reunion, and the poetry collection A Small Rising Up in the Lungs. Kit loves a good mystery but has only ever killed her characters. Honest. Visit Kit online at KitFrick.com and on Instagram @KitFrick.

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Chapter One ONE
This is the place where memories go to die.

Officially, Monte Viso’s sixth floor is the memory-support wing, but strip away the top-notch doctors, the warm and earnest aides, the cheerful signs in their block letters and bright primary colors, and the naked truth is: you’re in a vault of forgotten pasts.

There was a time when Mom remembered, and then a time when she did not. Her move here was a stark inflection point for both of us, the acknowledgment that a different future, one in which she spent her golden years rattling around her too-big house with its stately bones, was no longer possible.

I suppose all lives have such pivotal moments, paths diverging, cracking in two—though the finality of the split registers only when we take stock of the universe we now inhabit, surrender to the swift death of the other.

“Where are you taking me?” Mom’s voice is sharp, shaking me from my reverie. Her eyes dart around the off-white hallway, its fresh coat of paint and pale rose carpet failing to counteract the harsh, institutional glare and faint smell of spray cleaner that permeates the sixth floor.

“We’re going out to the courtyard,” I tell her again. “It’s finally cooled off. I brought pomegranate iced tea.”

Slowly, she nods, allowing me to take her elbow and guide her gently toward the elevator.

Seven o’clock is a sleepy time in memory support. Dinner has finished. The more social residents gather in the common room, watching TV or working at jigsaw puzzles. Many are already in bed. Over the past two months, the staff has grown accustomed to my daily routine, my insistence on taking Mom outside unless it’s pouring rain.

I call the elevator, and Mom straightens beside me. Tonight, like every night, she looks impeccable. A healthy shine brushed into her long, brown hair, the gray dyed away. Clothes selected to accentuate, not hide, her tall, upright frame. And just enough makeup to draw out her delicate features.

I take after her—tall, brunette, small features that look refined when made up and mousy in any other light—whereas my little sister, Esme, shares a lucky list of attributes with Dad: blond, effortlessly slim, undeniably attractive, disinclined to ever truly grow up.

The consistency in Mom’s outward appearance is a comfort when the changes to her brain have been so staggering. Familial Alzheimer’s. Early onset. The first signs began at forty-eight; maybe even earlier. In review, I amass a collection of moments of confusion, missed appointments, muddled memories that revealed their importance only in aggregate.

The elevator doors part, and we step inside. I type the access code into the keypad, eyes lingering on the small gray-and-white monitor strapped to Mom’s ankle. At sixty-three, she’s one of the youngest residents at Monte Viso. Unlike many of her peers, she is fully ambulatory, a flight risk. Hence the ankle monitor and access code, insurance she won’t wander away from the sixth floor unaccompanied, or worse, out of the building altogether.

“Hold that!”

The doors jerk back open, revealing Dr. James Paulson’s surprised face. It’s been a month since our breakup, a month during which I’ve carefully arranged my visits around his work schedule, intent on giving him space, on avoiding just such an awkward run-in.

“Oh,” I say, words failing me. My gaze darts from his name tag to his crisp white jacket to the small patch of freckles dusting his nose, unsure where to land.

Jamie recovers first, eyes resuming their familiar, amiable glow as he joins us in the car. He turns to my mother.

“Marjorie Connor. Always a pleasure.”

“You remember Dr. Paulson, Mom?” I ask, knowing full well she does not. On good days, Mom knows me. Close family, old friends. But new faces rarely stick, even the neurologist she saw for a year before his relationship with me made it necessary for her to switch doctors.

The elevator begins its descent, and Mom turns to me as if we are alone in the car. “He’s very handsome. And a doctor.”

I resist the temptation to roll my eyes. Mom’s family didn’t come from money, but marrying Dad—marrying Carl Connor’s wealth—changed everything. If it wasn’t for the favorable terms of the divorce settlement, she would have spent the past two decades living somewhere far more modest than the grand, rambling house on Boneset Lane.

Mom never made a secret of the fact that she wanted Esme and me to marry up. Unsurprisingly, she loves Esme’s husband, Mark Lloyd, of the New York Lloyds, who has been in my sister’s life long enough to stick in Mom’s brain.

Her comment about Jamie lingers in my ears. She has no idea how many months I spent wondering if he might be the one, if marriage was in our future. But not because he’s a doctor, or makes a doctor’s salary. I do just fine on my own at Empire, the private lender in Lower Manhattan to which I commute an hour and a half each way, every day. My job is the only way we can afford Monte Viso. All the time I spent on Jamie had nothing to do with career or money; I simply loved him. And it hasn’t been so easy to leave those feelings in the past.

When the doors open on the ground floor, I motion for Jamie to step out first.

“I didn’t know you’d be on the floor tonight,” I apologize, taking in his achingly familiar crop of brown hair, warm brown eyes, the dusky scruff along his jaw.

He shrugs. “My flight doesn’t leave until almost midnight. Haruto will be covering for me all next week.”

“Of course,” I say, guiding Mom out of the elevator and toward the courtyard doors. “Your trip,” I add, hoping it sounds like I’ve just remembered. Tonight, Jamie is leaving for San Francisco to visit his parents. For months, the trip sat on our shared calendar. For months, I hoped an invitation to join him might materialize. When he unlinked our accounts a week or so after the breakup, all of Jamie’s plans vanished into the ether, leaving my calendar the same uninspired clutter of work meetings and doctors’ appointments and visits with Mom.

Back when I first began bringing her to Jamie’s neurology practice on the Upper East Side, the best in the tristate area, I was still living in Brooklyn and working twelve-hour days, only starting to wrap my head around the reality of Mom’s diagnosis. How she’d require constant supervision, how I would need to return to my Connecticut hometown.

We began dating shortly before I moved back in with Mom. In the little over a year we were together, Jamie was sweet, thoughtful, kind—always there for me, even in the tough times, especially in the tough times. He thrived on being my support as Mom’s health worsened and I struggled to keep her safe at home; I imagine all doctors have a bit of a savior complex.

But eventually, when Mom was settled into Monte Viso, I was no longer someone in crisis mode, nor was I free to move back to the city. Seeing Mom every day was part of the deal I made with myself when I finally opted for long-term care. My life was in Branby now, my time in the city constrained to work.

When the dust settled, what Jamie and I had wasn’t enough: me here and Jamie based primarily in New York City, save for his two days a week at...

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Verlag
Atria/Emily Bestler Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668022478
ISBN 13 
9781668022474
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

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