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You Belong Here: A Novel - Hardcover

Miranda, Megan

 
9781668080979: You Belong Here: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1668080974 ISBN 13: 9781668080979
Verlag: Scribner, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“The perfect thriller to read with your toes in the sand while looking over your shoulder.” —The View

Don’t miss the instant New York Times bestseller from Megan Miranda, where a mother’s secrets, campus mysteries, and long-hidden truths ignite a haunting legacy.

Beckett Bowery never thought she’d return to Wyatt Valley, a picturesque college town in the Virginia mountains steeped in tradition. Her roots there were strong: Beckett’s parents taught at the college, and she never even imagined studying anywhere else—until a tragedy her senior year ended with two local men dead, and her roommate on the run, never to be seen again…

For the last two decades, Beckett has done her best to keep her distance. Then her daughter, Delilah, secretly applies to Wyatt College and earns a full scholarship, and Beckett can only hope that her lingering fears are unfounded. But deep down she knows that Wyatt Valley has a long memory, and that the past isn’t the only dangerous thing in town…

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Megan Miranda is the New York Times bestselling author of All the Missing Girls; The Perfect Stranger; The Last House Guest, which was a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick; The Girl from Widow Hills; Such a Quiet Place; The Last to Vanish; The Only Survivors; and Daughter of Mine. She grew up in New Jersey, graduated from MIT, and lives in North Carolina with her husband and two children. Follow @MeganLMiranda on X and Instagram, @AuthorMeganMiranda on Facebook, or visit MeganMiranda.com.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Prologue PROLOGUE
I knew how easily a story could shift. How quickly the public could turn. I’d seen it happen, twenty years earlier. A game sliding into a crime. A tradition twisting into a nightmare.

I watched as an arc slowly emerged from the series of headlines and police bulletins, until the story had a shape, the truth a sharp end point.

Structure Fire at Perimeter of Wyatt College Burns Through Night

Two Local Men Deceased in Steam Tunnels Under Campus

Police Seek Public’s Assistance in Locating Missing Student, Adalyn Vale

Person of Interest Named in Fire Deaths of Two Men

Wanted for questioning: Adalyn Vale

Wanted for murder: Adalyn Vale

In the days that followed, I’d felt a shift happening inside of me, too.

Confusion. She’d been my roommate for nearly four years—had been my closest friend in those earliest years of adulthood.

Denial. Thinking that the witnesses were mistaken. That she hadn’t meant to do it. It must’ve been an accident—flames in the wind, catching and spreading.

Anger. Because she had fled without a word. And in her absence, I was the only one left to answer for her.

And finally: Fear.

Fear that she’d done exactly what they claimed and I hadn’t known her at all.

Fear because the police thought I was protecting her. And now they kept coming back to me.

Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1
Wednesday, August 13

5:00 p.m.

For the moment, nothing outside moved. Not the tall grass lining the highway, encroaching on the edges of the asphalt; not the haze in the sky, hovering over the mountains; and not the sinuous curve of brake lights disappearing into the landscape in front of us.

Only Delilah fidgeting in the seat beside me, checking the time on her phone yet again.

“We’re going to be late,” she said, her leg bouncing from either nerves or excitement. With her, sometimes, it was hard to tell. She was a theater kid, functioning at all extremes, with conviction. But the nuances were harder to discern.

“It’s just dinner,” I said. Which was only partially true. Tonight it was dinner at my parents’ house in town. But tomorrow it was dorm move-in. It was the start of my daughter’s first semester. It was time to say goodbye.

I didn’t understand how we had gotten here so quickly. The previous eighteen years had stretched into a lifetime, and suddenly time was catapulting, leapfrogging.

Over the past year, I’d often been caught off guard by the race of time, missing deadlines, receiving follow-up emails from the high school’s commencement coordinator: Did you order the graduation regalia? Reserve your tickets? It seemed I wasn’t quite ready to face it, so some primitive part of my brain was blocking out key facts.

You’ll be ready when it’s time, my friends who had crossed this milestone before me would say. Trust me, they’d say with a secret look, a knowing grin. Wait until you see what an eighteen-year-old brings into your home.

But she’d turned eighteen in the spring, and I still wasn’t ready.

I was never ready.

Not for the first high fever or the first broken bone—my first failure to keep her safe. I wasn’t ready for the first time I lost her in a store, calling her name frantically down the aisles. The first time she slammed her bedroom door (I’d never felt an echo in my heart like that before). The first secret.

I’d been trying to prepare myself for the feeling of an empty house. A new rhythm, a new routine—but I couldn’t slip it into focus. I felt stranded somewhere in time, with no anchor.

It’s not that Delilah never left. On the contrary, she was fiercely independent—a particular point of pride for both of us. She spent a month with her father each summer. A long weekend here and there with my parents. She went on trips with the school and had sleepovers with friends, got home late (she was always late), made plans and forgot to share them, intentional or not.

But these things were all so temporary, bookended by her presence.

Now she rested her forehead against the window and groaned—as if I could do anything about the standstill traffic on the single route through the Virginia mountains.

I wanted to say: We can turn around. It’s not too late.

I wanted to say: We shouldn’t even be here.

Up until the spring, I’d thought we had a different plan: Two acceptances to in-state schools. A partial scholarship tilting the balance toward one. Easy driving distances.

But somehow we were here instead, on this winding mountain road, driving the four—now six—hours back to the one place I’d tried so hard to leave behind.

I could still feel that jolt of surprise and betrayal when the decision letter arrived—the familiar W of the emblem, sharp as a knife. The realization that she’d applied without telling me.

There were other people I’d tried to blame first: my parents, for still living in Wyatt Valley, just beyond the edge of campus, even after retiring from the faculty. I imagined the stories they must’ve told my daughter, poisoning her with promise. Not to mention the view I knew Delilah had out my old bedroom window on her visits, of the gray stone buildings climbing up the hillside in the distance, like a secret idyll.

The admissions committee, for accepting her in the first place and then making it impossible to say no by offering her a fully covered Presidential Scholarship. If they cared—if they really cared—they would’ve rejected her, in a disguised act of kindness.

I found myself blaming Delilah, even, who had probably marked on the application that she was a legacy, even though that wasn’t technically true. I’d left midway through my senior year, transferred my credits, and finished abroad at a sister school, so my diploma carried the name of a different college.

But I knew the fault was mostly mine. I’d wanted to keep the past from her, pretend it never existed. And in doing so, I had only managed to push her closer, like a magnet. Shouldn’t I have known better by now? It was the singular truth of the teenage years, binding us all across time—a yearning for the forbidden.

Even as she’d sent back her acceptance, I’d imagined all the things I could’ve done to prevent this moment, tracing my missteps all the way back to the start.

I shouldn’t have been so determined to give her my last name instead of her father’s—which would have provided her a layer of removal, making her surname unrecognizable to the town. Delilah Bowery… daughter of Beckett? Granddaughter of the professors Bowery? I should’ve invited my parents to visit us in Charlotte more often so they wouldn’t insist on having Delilah in Wyatt Valley, so close to campus. I should’ve paid more attention during her senior year, asked the obvious question: Are you planning to apply anywhere else? So I could say: Don’t you know what happened there? Don’t you know why I left? Why I had to?

Two men had died. My roommate, the prime suspect, had fled without a trace. And in her absence, I had briefly become a person of interest. Someone the police thought might have more answers than I gave them. Someone the town thought might have been complicit, might have helped the guilty party disappear.

But that...

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Verlag
Scribner
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668080974
ISBN 13 
9781668080979
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande