11 New Upcoming Books to Read This June –– 2020 Summer Selection

The earth is black with last night’s rain—a perfect morning for shadows.

When I arrive at my mentor’s tower door, my damp gloves barely brush the heavy wood before it flies open. Its half dozen locks jangle and clack noisily. For a blind woman whose eyes are always concealed behind a scarf, Kendara’s face can convey an impressive amount of disdain.

“Sirscha Ashwyn, you thoughtless dolt,” she says, her voice low and gravelly. “Took you long enough.” She used to speak more gently when I was younger. Maybe that’s why the sound of it still makes me smile, even when she’s insulting me.

“I was only gone for an hour,” I say, shutting the door behind me.

Kendara snorts as she returns to the chair by the open balcony. There’s a white circle painted into the floor of the balcony, large enough to fit two battling opponents. I’ve earned more wounds than I can count in that circle, but this tower is the ideal place to conduct our training, high away from the watchful eyes of the palace. A dagger lies on the seat of her chair, and she picks it up as smoothly as if she can see. Sitting, she tests the blade’s edge with the thick pad of her thumb.

To a stranger, she is a woman descending into old age, her hair gone white save for a few stubborn streaks of black. Age spots speckle the deep bronze of her skin, which is a couple of shades darker than my own. But she is far from infirm. The dagger she handles and the weapons that hang from her wall aren’t decorative. She is the queen’s Shadow, and for the past four years, my secret mentor.

“Would have taken me half the time,” she grumbles, reaching for the whetstone that rests on the floor. “And withoutthe need to show off.”

My nose wrinkles as I remove my gloves. Opening my satchel, I dig inside for the banner I appropriated from the city’s southern watchtower. I may have also waved at the tower guards while scaling the walls.

“I wasn’t showing off.” I’ve learned to stop being surprised—and to stop denying—when Kendara knows things she has no business knowing. “I was just having a bit of fun.”

“The Shadow does not reveal herself for any reason. What would be the point, then?”

I hold out the banner. “I’m not Shadow yet,” I say with an emphasis on yet and the hope that she’ll take the hint.

“And you won’t be if you keep behaving like a compulsive twit.” The whetstone clatters to the floor as she snatches the banner out of my hand. She stalks across the room, weaving neatly around a table, and flings the silver moon of Evewyn into the flames of her hearth.

“What are you doing, you daft hag?” I shout, dashing after her.

The flames take a second to catch, the banner still damp from the rain. But quickly enough, fire sears through the thin fabric, sparking blue from the spidersilk threads of the moon. Dark smoke billows up the chimney. The smell singes my nostrils, and I try to wave it away, toward the open balcony.

“Idiot girl,” Kendara mumbles as she sets down the dagger. She opens a cupboard that hangs skewed on the wall. “I don’t want that thing in here.” Cursing me under her breath, she rummages through the cupboard’s overflowing contents.

I glance back at the hearth and the ruined remains of the banner. Grudgingly, I see her point. Once, Evewyn’s banners had flown a white falcon clutching a branch of plum blossoms. But when the queen succeeded the throne eight years ago, she changed the emblem to a silver moon, the symbol of the Pale Twin, harbinger of ill fortune.

“Then why did you send me to retrieve it?” I ask. Smoke lingers in the room, a dingy haze that stings my eyes and tickles my throat. Kendara is still preoccupied, so I move toward the balcony where the air is clearer.

From this height, the capital of Vos Talwyn is an enormous sprawl of stone, statues, and curling green rooftops. Beyond the city’s walls, the land extends south like lush brocade stitched with the golden threads of morning. A shadowy ribbon against the horizon draws my eye eastward. Even from this distance, a shiver slithers down my spine. The Dead Wood mars the eastern border like the puckered, blackened edges of burnt fabric.

“I told you to steal the banner from the watchtower,” Kendara says, drawing my attention again. I return to sit near the hearth as she withdraws something small from the cupboard. “I didn’t tell you to bring it to me.”

“Well, now I can’t even put it back,” I say, but our bickering is forgotten when she places a bracelet on the table before me. With a quick glance at Kendara, who nods to confirm that I can touch it, I trace my finger along the designs carved into the jewelry. The smooth texture glistens like white jade. “What is it made of?”

“Troll bone.”

My finger stills on the bracelet. Intrigued, I lean in closer to examine it. The bracelet can’t be thicker than the width of my little finger. “I would’ve thought troll bone would be bigger.”

Kendara grunts, a noise I’ve come to recognize as scorn for my imagined ignorance. She has a wide array of such sounds.

Lifting the bracelet, I turn it toward the sunlight that streams in through the open balcony and diffuses into the smoky air. The polished surface gives off a beautiful sheen, and the color transitions from a warm butter to the burnt yellow of old parchment. The jeweler etched a curling design into the bone that lends it an elegant quality. A metal fastener fashioned to look like tiny lotus petals allows a section of the bone to be removed so that the bracelet can be worn. It’s lovely but somewhat grotesque, given its origin.

“For you,” she says.

I almost drop the bracelet. But I recover quickly, clutching the troll bone in my fist. “I…um. Thank you. It’s very…thoughtful.” I narrow my eyes. “And unusual. Why are you giving me this?”

Kendara is many things, but thoughtful is not one of them. It’s part of what I admire about her. She never pretends to be anything other than who she is.

She turns away, but not before I notice the slight purse of her mouth. It’s not a smile—Kendara does not smile—but sometimes the muscles around her mouth spasm and twitch, like she’s trying to imitate the motions. It’s just as well. An actual smile might break her face.

“Trolls are slow creatures but wickedly strong,” she says. So I’m to decipher the bracelet’s purpose on my own. “Anyone with the misfortune to be caught by one isn’t likely to survive long enough to speak of it.”

“But you speak as if from experience.” I pop open the segment of bone fastened to the metal lotus and fit the jewelry around my wrist before snapping the piece back in place. I barely feel
its weight.

“I’ve had a great many experiences, none of which are any of your business.” Kendara flits restlessly around the workroom, returning vials of unknown substances into cupboards and books to shelves.

“Fortunately, you’re not likely to encounter any trolls in Evewyn. Nor anywhere else in Thiy. The last colony died out some time after the shamans claimed the eastern lands for their own.”

How old must the bone be if no living troll has existed in Thiy for nearly a thousand years? It must be extremely rare as well. “I suppose that means you’re not sending me out to bring you a fresh rib for a matching necklace.”

“Trolls were known to be highly resistant to magic,” she says, completely ignoring me. Another of her many talents.

Although I’ve no idea what use she has for books, I’ve read every volume she’s crammed into her numerous shelves. I recall a passage that explained how the remains of powerful creatures, such as trolls, retain certain magical properties that the creatures possessed when they were alive. Shamans often fashioned the bones of such creatures into objects like this bracelet. But not
as jewelry.

“It’s a talisman,” I say, twisting the bracelet around my wrist. It’s still cool, despite that it should have warmed from my body heat.

Depending on the creature a talisman is made from, the bones not only protect against outside magic but dampen one’s own magic as well. Or amplify and change it. Those sorts of talismans are rare.

But a troll’s bone? “Protection against magic.” My smile broadens and my heart sings with a longing bordering on desperation. “Will I need such protection?”

Has the moment I’ve longed for these past four years finally arrived? Will she at last name me as her apprentice?

“Most of you do,” she mutters. I mentally curse at the way I flinch—not only for the implied insult that I should need protection beyond my own abilities but also for the reminder that I am not her only pupil. The knowledge—the fear—that I could so easily lose all I’ve worked for to some other nameless competitor is never far from my thoughts.

Minnow, 14

March 1942

It’s been over three months since the attack on Pearl Harbor, and my oldest brother, Mas, has told me to come straight home from school each day. Take the bus, he says. No loitering around, he says. I mean it, Minnow.

I used to love walking back to the apartment in the afternoons, seeing all the interesting things going on in the city: bodies being excavated at Calvary Cemetery, buildings going up in empty lots, chattering kids coming out of Kinmon Gakuen, the old Japanese language school. 

But that’s been closed since last December, when it became the Civil Control Station, because Pearl Harbor changed everything for us. We have a new eight-p.m. curfew. People are starting to talk about involuntary evacuation. And Mas has warned me not to get caught out alone. Don’t do anything that’ll make them come down on you, he says. Don’t give them any excuse.

And I haven’t.

Until today.

I don’t know what happened. I was walking out of George Washington High School, headed for the bus stop like always, when I saw the football team practicing on the field, racing back and forth across the grass with the red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge rising beyond the school building like a promise, and before I knew it, I was sitting in the bleachers with my sketchbook in my hands and my butt going numb on the concrete.

Oops.

I’m so panicked, I gather up my sketchpad and bolt right past the bus stop, hoping to make it home before Mas gets back from work.

No matter how many times I try to explain it, he never understands. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in a drawing that I get transported onto the paper, and the charcoal suspension cables and pencil players become more real to me than the bleachers or the grass or the school, and when I come back to my body, it’s hours later, everyone’s gone, and I’m walking home alone as fog cascades into the bay.

I know it’d be faster if I waited for a bus, but I’m afraid if I hang around at one of the stops, someone will chase me off, or call me “Jap!” or worse. So I keep walking, and buses keep passing me while I’m between stops, and I keep thinking I should just wait at the next one, but . . . 

Mas says that’s my problem—there’s always something going on inside my head, but I never think.

My middle brother, Shig, likes to tell him it’s because my head’s up in the clouds, where it doesn’t do me any good.

I’m still walking, trying to decide if I should keep going or try waiting, when I catch sight of a flyer for Sutro Baths in a drugstore window, and I stop cold. For a second, all I can think is, Mas was right. I don’t think.

I should’ve gone straight home. I should’ve waited for a bus. I shouldn’t be out like this. Because it’s dangerous to be hanging around with a face like mine, three months into the war.

––

It was a Sunday in December, and we were getting ready for lunch when Mas asked Shig to turn on the radio and we all heard the news that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. Mom’s face went taut and white as a sheet. If

I was going to draw her the way she looked then, I’d draw her with thin lips and frightened eyes, pinned to a clothesline, her body flapping in the wind of a passing Nakajima B5N bomber.

––

After the attack, the chimneys in Japantown bloomed with smoke. In the living room, Mom dug into her trunks and began feeding heirlooms into the fireplace, starting with the Japanese flag. I remember her kneeling by the hearth, plump hands folded in her lap, watching the flames obliterate the white sky, the red sun. Next, she burned letters from relatives I’d never met, Jii-chan’s Imperial Army uniform, smelling of mothballs, and a woodblock print of ancestral warriors I used to study for hours (the armor, the ferocious eyes, the wild, battle-blown hair). They looked nothing like me, in my denim and button-downs.

Mas tried to stop her (some of the things she was burning belonged to Dad), but she didn’t stop.

“I’m not a citizen,” she told him. “If they think I’m disloyal, they’ll take me away like Oishi-san.”

Mr. Oishi, Shig’s girl Yum-yum’s dad, is a businessman with contacts in Japan. The FBI whisked him away the night of the bombing like a piece of litter.

He and Mom are what the government calls “enemy aliens.”

We call them Issei. They’re the first generation of Japanese immigrants to come to the United States, but they’ve never been allowed to become naturalized citizens.

That night, I sat on our stoop and drew the Japantown skyline with storm-colored flowers rising from the rooftops, dispersing ash like seeds on the wind.

Once, a girl lived in a ­double-wide trailer on ranchland, beneath a wide white sky tumbled with clouds. The Prophet, a scowling crow of a man, presided over everyone and everything.

When the girl wasn’t praying or busy with chores, she’d spin in meadows dancing with bees and dandelions, until Father called her name from the porch: “Agnes, back in the house!”

Run.

In Agnes’s world, secular music was forbidden, as was television, radio, and all technologies of sin. She wore homemade dresses that draped every inch of skin, though they were far too hot. At twelve, boys and girls were forbidden to play together, and the Prophet called the children little sinners with a sneer.

Nevertheless, Agnes loved her world. Loved the meadow and the rocky canyon and the hawks that screeched overhead, winging impossibly high.

One day, the meadow spoke. She was dancing when the hum rose up through the bottoms of her feet and into her small, ­little-girl bones.

It was like a song. An old song. She pressed her ear to the ground and listened. Rocks pulsed, stones echoed, and clouds, trees, leaves rustled with melody. The girl smiled, her heart full, because God had opened her ears. He’d scratched the earth with His fingernail and revealed a hidden world.

The girl was too young to see the danger in being singled out in a land where the Prophet expected his faithful to march like paper dolls, arm in arm, and all the same.

Perfect obedience produces perfect faith.

In Sunday school, Mrs. King asked the children if they remembered to pray.

“I don’t need to pray,” said Agnes. “Because God is singing, everywhere, all the time.”

Children snickered. Their teacher swiftly crossed the room. She grabbed Agnes’s arm, her face purple with anger, and stretched it across the desk. Then she slammed a Bible’s spine across her knuckles, over and over, until the middle knuckle of her left hand cracked like a nut.

Pain exploded up her arm. She knew better than to scream. The woman bent and poured poison into her ear. “Insolent child. Only the Prophet hears the voice of God. Lie again and I’ll show you real pain.”

That night, hand throbbing and swollen, the girl told herself she didn’t hear the sky singing or the earth humming. That she’d never heard such lovely, evil things.

Never. Never.

Perfect obedience produces perfect faith.

Agnes pretended so hard not to hear that one day, she didn’t.

The world went silent, all song snuffed out like a candle flame.

When she returned, hesitant and barefoot, to the ­bee-spun meadow, she heard nothing.

Nothing at all.

“Nice socks.”

Nice socks? Smooth is not a word anyone anywhere would ever use to describe me. In fact, in the dictionary, under a picture of me, Andre Rosario, would be a list of words that are the opposite of smooth. Bumpy, lumpy, knobby, stony, rocky, rugged, rutted, pitted. I could go on, but I probably shouldn’t. You get the point.

But what else was I supposed to say to Dean Arnault, the son of my father’s sworn enemy, and therefore my sworn enemy? Okay, fine. “Enemy” is probably me being a little extra, but he’s still the son of my dad’s political opponent in the presidential race, and the holder of some highly questionable political opinions, and therefore not someone I should’ve been talking to except that his family and my family were in the same room at the same time and someone thought it would be a great photo op, so they kept shoving us together. I had to say something before things got super uncomfortable.

Also, they really were nice socks.

Dean Arnault reached up to brush his hand through his hair, stopped, and dropped his hand to his side like he could hear his mother telling him not to mess up the hard work his stylist had put into making him the perfect picture of a young Republican. Sandy hair with an aggressive side part and not a strand out of place, brown eyes, freckled cheeks, a roman nose, and a chiseled jaw with a tiny dimple in his chin. Not that I thought he was cute. He was wearing loafers, for heaven’s sake. Loafers! Like a forty-year-old man on his way to the country club to shoot eighteen holes and discuss long-term investment options.

“Thank you,” Dean said after a pause that was too short to be long and too long to be brief. It was like he was on a tape delay so that the censors monitoring him through implants in his brain could bleep out anything scandalous before it had the chance to leave his mouth.

“Could you squeeze in a little more?” the photographer said. “This one’s for the history books.”

“Yes,” Janice Arnault said. “The caption underneath will read ‘President Arnault and family with presidential hopeful Tomás Rosario.’”

Everyone, including my parents, laughed like Governor Arnault had told a stunningly hilarious joke instead of insinuating that she was going to win the election, even though she was trailing my father by three points according to FiveThirtyEight.com.

“Or,” I said, “it might read—” My mother pinched the back of my arm, and I yelped. She was still smiling, but her eyes told me that this was not the time for my mouth, and that if I didn’t shut it, there would be oh-so-much hell to pay when we got home.

“It might read something else,” I mumbled, but no one was paying attention to me anymore. Which was probably for the best.

I tried not to make any inappropriate faces while the photographer was snapping pictures, but it was pretty difficult. I’d already made concessions by putting on that ridiculous tan suit, even if I worked it harder than any tan suit had been worked in its life. What I’d really wanted to wear was some kind of fabulous suit-gown hybrid like I’d seen Billy Porter strut the red carpet in multiple times. I’d even conceded to cleaning the polish off my fingernails for the night, though I’d then painted my toes Tangerine Scream in protest. Plus, I’d allowed my mom’s stylist to cut three inches off my hair even though I’d liked my hair the way it was. All of those concessions had left me with very little patience for putting up with Janice Arnault and the Von Frat family.

“Dre?” My dad nudged me as the photographer asked for some photos of just the Arnaults. “You’re not still upset with me, are you?”

I shrugged, refusing to look at my dad. “Upset? Why would I be upset? It’s not like I had plans tonight and that you essentially forced me at gunpoint to abandon my best friend in order to attend this.”

“I’m sure Mel understands,” Dad said. “And there was no gun.”

“May as well have been.” I had trouble seeing my dad the way other people did. To one half of the country, he was the passionate, handsome, future leader of the country. To the other half, he was a baby-killing, Satan-worshipping foreigner who had no business running anything other than a convenience store. But to me, he was the guy who sang Beyoncé songs with a whisk while making pancakes, was afraid of lizards, forced me to attend ridiculous political events when I had better things to do, and had gone from Dad of the Year to Dad Who? in the span of an election cycle.

“This will get easier, Dre.”

“You mean when you’re president and we have Secret Service agents controlling our every move, and we have to be doubly concerned about the press examining the minute details of our private lives and roasting us for every fumble and fuckup?”

“Language, Dre,” my mom said from where she was standing with Jose Calderon, my father’s dictatorial campaign manager, pretending not to listen in.

Dad chuckled. “It won’t be that bad.”

“It’s already that bad.”

“Then at least it can’t get much worse.” My dad slung his arm around me and pulled me into a hug. I caught Dean watching us, and he quickly turned away like the affection embarrassed him. I figured his parents probably thought there was something unmanly about a father hugging his son. Dean and his dad probably exchanged firm handshakes and the occasional nod.

“Besides,” my dad went on. “I might not even win.”

“What do you think I wish for every night before I go to sleep?”

“Andre?” Jose was waving for my attention. “The photographer wants a couple with just the children.”

“I’m seventeen, so, not a child.”

“Do it for me,” Dad said.

“Not a chance,” I replied, but my dad was already pushing me toward Dean, who was standing in front of a tall American flag.

“I know you hate this, Dre, but it’s important to me, okay?”

I shook my head. “Whatever. But you owe me so big. Like, maybe it’s finally time to buy me a car big.”

Dad clapped me on the shoulder. “Not a chance. Have fun!”

Fun. Sure. I couldn’t imagine any world where spending a single second with Dean Arnault would be considered fun, but I trudged toward him anyway because that was the sacrifice I was willing to make to help my father become president of the United States.

Her name was Jenny Hauser and every Wednesday I put pickles on her pizza. 

The first time she called in it’d been mid-June, the summer of 2011. I’d been at Eddie’s a little over a month. My uniform polo was green and orange and scratchy at the pits, people would loudly thank me and then tip me a dollar, at the end of shifts my hair reeked of garlic. Every hour I thought about quitting, but I was eighteen, didn’t know how to do much of anything, eleven weeks pregnant.

At least it got me out of the house. 

The morning she’d called, Mom hugged me four times, Billy five, all before I’d pulled on my socks and poured milk over my cereal. They hurled “I love yous” against my back as I fast-walked out the front door. Some days, I wanted to turn around and hug them back. On others, I wanted to punch them straight in the face, run away to Thailand, Hawaii, Myrtle Beach, somewhere with sun and ocean. 

I thank God that Darryl’s boyfriend fucked a Walgreens checkout girl. 

If Darryl’s boyfriend had been kind, loyal, kept his dick in his pants, I wouldn’t have answered the phone that day. Darryl could make small talk with a tree, had a laugh that made shoulders relax––be manned the counter and answered the phones, I just waited for addresses and drove the warm boxes to their homes. 

But Darryl’s boyfriend was having a quarter-life crisis. Ketchup no longer tasted right, law school was starting to give him headaches, at night he lay awake next to the man he loved and counted sheep, 202, 203, 204, tried not to ask the question that had ruined his favorite condiment, spoiled his dreams, replaced sleep with sheep––is this it? One day, he walked into a Walgreens to buy a pack of gum and was greeted by a smile and a pair of D cups. The next day, Darryl spent most of his shift curbside, yelling into his phone. The front door was wide open, and I tried not to listen, but failed.

“On our first date you told me that even the word ‘pussy’ made you feel like you needed a shower.”

It was the slowest part of the day. A quarter past three. Too late for lunch, too early for dinner, pizza was heavy for a mid-afternoon snack. The place was empty except for me and the three cooks. They waved hello and goodbye and not much else. I couldn’t tell if they didn’t speak English or if they just didn’t want to speak to me. 

“You know you’ve ruined Walgreens for me, right? I’m going to have to drive ten extra minutes now and go to the CVS to get my Twizzlers. God damn it, you know that I can’t get through a day without my fucking Twizzlers.”

I was sitting on an empty table, turning paper napkins into birds and stars and listening to my iPod at a volume that allowed me to think, but not too deeply. I couldn’t remember the name of the boy I used to share Cheetos with in first grade. I wondered if I had ever used every drop of a pen’s ink. All shades of blue made my chest warm. 

Our boss, Peter, napped around this time. Every day, at 3:00 pm without fail, he’d close his office door and ask us to please, please not fuck anything up. We never fucked anything up. We also didn’t get much done. I stared at a large puddle of orange soda on the floor and made a paper napkin man to sit among the birds and the stars.

“Oh God, tell me you wore a condom.”

The phone rang then. I was about to call for Darryl. He started shouting about abortion. 

I’d be lying if I said I don’t look back on this moment and feel its weight. I could’ve just let it ring––no one would’ve known. I didn’t. I hopped off the table, walked to the counter, picked up the phone, and heard her voice for the first time. 

“So––have you ever had the kind of week where every afternoon seems to last for hours?” Her voice was heavy, quivering, the sound of genuine desperation. Before I could reply, the woman kept talking. “Like, you’ll water your plants, fold your laundry, make your kid a snack, vacuum the rug, a couple articles, watch some TV, call your mom, wash your face, maybe do some ab exercises to get the blood pumping, and then you’ll check the clock and thirteen minutes have passed. You know?”

I opened my mouth, but she kept on going.

“And it’s only Wednesday! I’m insane, I know. I’m insane. But do you know what I mean?”

I waited a few beats to make sure she was done. Her breathing was loud and labored. 

“Um, yeah,” I said. “I guess.”

“Yes! So–you’ll help me?”

I frowned, started ripping up an old receipt. “I think you may have the wrong number.”

“Is this Eddie’s?”

“Oh, yeah. It is.”

“Then this is exactly the right number. You’re the only person who can help me.”

I remember shivering, wanting to wrap this woman in a blanket and make her hot chocolate, fuck up anyone that even looked at her funny. “Okay, what can I do?”

“I need a large pepperoni-and-pickles pizza or my son will not eat.”

“I can put in an order for a large pepperoni pizza. We don’t have pickles as topping, though.”

“I kno you dont. Nowhere out here does,” she said. “You’re the sixth place I’ve called.”

“So what are you asking?” I rubbed my lower back. It had been aching inexplicably the past couple of weeks. I figured it was the baby’s fault.

“We just moved here a month ago from North Dakota. My husband got an amazing job offer and we love it here, all the palm trees, but our son, Adam, hates Los Angeles. He misses home, his friends, he doesn’t get along with his new baseball coach.” She sighed.

She continued: “He’s on a hunger strike. A couple days ago he came up to me and said, ‘Mommy, I’m not eating a damn thing until we go back to Bismarck.’ Can you believe that? Who has ever sad that? Who likes Bismarck? And that potty mouth! Seven years old and already talking like a fucking sailer. How does that happen?”

I wasn’t even sure if she was talking to me anymore. I looked at the clock and saw that I’d been on the phone for over five minutes. It was the longest conversation I’d had with someone other than Mom or Billy in weeks. Darryl too, I guess, but that felt like it didn’t count. 

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I just still don’t understand how I can help with this.”

There was a long pause. I would’ve thought she’d hung up if not for that loud, labored breathing.

When she spoke again, her voice was softer. I thought of birds with broken wings, glass vases so beautiful and fragile I was afraid to look at them for too long. “It just feels like I’ve been failing a lot lately,” she said. “I can’t even get dinner right.”

Monday, February 21
The Day Before the Crash

“Danielle,” I say, entering the small office that sits adjacent to our living room. “Please let Mr. Cook know I’m going to the gym.”

She looks up from her computer, and I see her gaze snag on the bruise along the base of my throat, concealed with a thin layer of makeup. I automatically adjust my scarf to cover it, knowing she won’t mention it. She never does.

“We have a meeting at Center Street Literacy at four,” she says. “You’ll be late again.” Danielle keeps track of my calendar and my missteps, and I’ve pegged her as the one most likely to report when I don’t arrive on time to meetings, or when I cancel appointments that my husband, Rory, deems important. If I’m going to run for Senate, we don’t have the luxury of making mistakes, Claire.

“Thank you, Danielle. I can read the calendar as well as you can. Please have my notes from the last meeting uploaded and ready to go. I’ll meet you there.” As I leave the room, I hear her pick up the phone and my step falters, knowing this might draw attention at a time when I can’t afford it.

People always ask what it’s like being married into the Cook family, a political dynasty second only to the Kennedys. I deflect with information about our foundation, trained to keep my focus on the work instead of the rumors. On our third-­world literacy and water initiatives, the inner-city mentoring programs, the cancer research.

What I can’t tell them is that it’s a constant battle to find any privacy. Even inside our home, people are there at all hours. Assistants. Household staff who cook and clean for us. I have to fight for every spare minute and every square inch to call my own. There is nowhere that’s safe from the eyes of Rory’s staff, all of them devoted Cook employees. Even after ten years of marriage, I’m still the interloper. The outsider who needs to be watched.

I’ve learned how to make sure there’s nothing to see.

The gym is one of the few places Danielle doesn’t follow, trailing after me with her lists and schedules. It’s where I meet Petra, the only friend I have left from my life before Rory, and the only one Rory hasn’t forced me to abandon.

Because as far as Rory knows, Petra doesn’t exist.

––

When I arrive at the gym, Petra is already there. I change in the locker room, and when I climb the stairs to the rows of treadmills, she’s on the landing, taking a clean towel from the stack. Our eyes meet for a moment, and then she looks away as I help myself to a towel.

“Are you nervous?” she whispers.

“Terrified,” I say, turning and walking away.

I run for an hour, my eyes on the clock, and when I step into the sauna at exactly two thirty with a towel wrapped around my body, my muscles ache with exhaustion. The air is thick with steam, and I smile at Petra, who sits alone on the top row, her face red with heat.

“Do you remember Mrs. Morris?” she asks when I sit down next to her.

I smile, grateful to think of something from a simpler time. Mrs. Morris was our government teacher in the twelfth grade, and Petra almost failed the class.

“You studied with me every afternoon for a month,” she continues. “When none of the other kids would come near me or Nico because of who our father was, you stepped up and made sure I graduated.”

I turn on the wooden bench to face her. “You make it sound like you and Nico were pariahs. You had friends.”

Petra shakes her head. “People being nice to you because your father is the Russian version of Al Capone doesn’t make them friends.” We’d attended an elite school in Pennsylvania, where the children and grandchildren of old money viewed Petra and her brother, Nico, as a novelty, sliding up to them, as if on a dare, to see how close they could get, but never letting either of them all the way in.

And so we’d formed a trio of outcasts. Petra and Nico made sure no one made fun of my secondhand uniform or the beat-up Honda my mother used to pick me up in, rattling its way to the curb, belching exhaust in its wake. They made sure I didn’t eat alone and dragged me to school events I’d have skipped otherwise. They put themselves between me and the other kids, the ones who made cruel, cutting remarks about how I was merely a day student on scholarship, too poor, too common to truly be one of them. Petra and Nico were friends to me at a time when I had none.

––

It felt like fate, the day I walked into the gym two years ago and saw Petra, an apparition from my past. But I wasn’t the same person Petra would remember from high school. Too much had changed. Too much I’d have to explain about my life and what I’d lost along the way. And so I’d kept my gaze averted, while Petra’s stare drilled into me, willing me to look up. To acknowledge her.

When my workout was over, I made my way to the locker room, hoping to hide out in the sauna until after Petra had left. But when I’d entered, she was there. As if that had been our plan all along.

“Claire Taylor,” she said.

Hearing her say my old name made me smile despite myself. Memories came rushing back, found in the tone and cadence of Petra’s voice that still carried a trace of the Russian she spoke at home. In an instant, I had felt like my old self, not the persona I’d cultivated over the years as Rory’s wife, glossy and unknowable, burying her secrets beneath a hard surface.

We started slowly, making small talk that quickly turned personal as we caught up on the years since we’d last seen each other. Petra had never married. Instead, she drifted through life, supported by her brother, who now ran the family organization.

“And you,” she said, gesturing toward my left hand. “You’re married?”

I studied her through the steam, surprised she didn’t know. “I married Rory Cook.”

“Impressive,” Petra said.

I looked away, waiting for her to ask what people always asked—what really happened to Maggie Moretti, the name that will forever be linked to my husband’s, the girl who’d catapulted from anonymity to infamy simply because, long ago, she’d once loved Rory.

But Petra just leaned back on her bench and said, “I saw that interview he did with Kate Lane on CNN. The work he’s done with the foundation is remarkable.”

“Rory is very passionate.” A response that conveyed truth, if anyone cared to dig deeper.

“How are your mom and sister? Violet must be done with college by now.”

I’d been dreading that question. Even after so many years, the loss of them was still sharp. “They died in a car accident fourteen years ago. Violet had just turned eleven.” I kept my explanation brief. A rainy Friday night. A drunk driver who ran a stop sign. A collision in which they both died instantly.

“Oh, Claire,” Petra had said. She didn’t offer platitudes or force me to rehash things. Instead she sat with me, letting the silence hold my grief, knowing there was nothing that could be said that would make it hurt less.

The morning one of the lost twins returned to Mallard, Lou LeBon ran to the diner to break the news, and even now, many years later, everyone remembers the shock of sweaty Lou pushing through the glass doors, chest heaving, neckline darkened with his own effort. The barely awake customers clamored around him, ten or so, although more would lie and say that they’d been there too, if only to pretend that this once, they’d witnessed something truly exciting. In that little farm town, nothing surprising ever happened, not since the Vignes twins had disappeared. But that morning in April 1968, on his way to work, Lou spotted Desiree Vignes walking along Partridge Road, carrying a small leather suitcase. She looked exactly the same as when she’d left at sixteen-still light, her skin the color of sand barely wet. Her hipless body reminding him of a branch caught in a strong breeze. She was hurrying, her head bent, and-Lou paused here, a bit of a showman-she was holding the hand of a girl, eight or so, and black as tar.

“Blueblack,” he said. “Like she flown direct from Africa.”

Lou’s Egg House splintered into a dozen different conversations. The line cook wondered if it had been Desiree after all, since Lou was turning sixty in May and still too vain to wear his eyeglasses. The waitress said that it had to be-even a blind man could spot a Vignes girl and it certainly couldn’t have been that other one. The diners, abandoning grits and eggs on the counter, didn’t care about that Vignes foolishness-who on earth was the dark child? Could she possibly be Desiree’s?

“Well, who else’s could it be?” Lou said. He grabbed a handful of napkins from the dispenser, dabbing his damp forehead.

“Maybe it’s an orphan that got took in.”

“I just don’t see how nothin that black coulda come out Desiree.”

“Desiree seem like the type to take in no orphan to you?”

Of course she didn’t. She was a selfish girl. If they remembered anything about Desiree, it was that and most didn’t recall much more. The twins had been gone fourteen years, nearly as long as anyone had ever known them. Vanished from bed after the Founder’s Day dance, while their mother slept right down the hall. One morning, the twins crowded in front of their bathroom mirror, four identical girls fussing with their hair. The next, the bed was empty, the covers pulled back like any other day, taut when Stella made it, crumpled when Desiree did. The town spent all morning searching for them, calling their names through the woods, wondering stupidly if they had been taken. Their disappearance seemed as sudden as the rapture, all of Mallard the sinners left behind.

Naturally, the truth was neither sinister nor mystical; the twins soon surfaced in New Orleans, selfish girls running from responsibility. They wouldn’t stay away long. City living would tire them out. They’d run out of money and gall and come sniffling back to their mother’s porch. But they never returned again. Instead, after a year, the twins scattered, their lives splitting as evenly as their shared egg. Stella became white and Desiree married the darkest man she could find.

Now she was back, Lord knows why. Homesick, maybe. Missing her mother after all those years or wanting to flaunt that dark daughter of hers. In Mallard, nobody married dark. Nobody left either, but Desiree had already done that. Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.

In Lou’s Egg House, the crowd dissolved, the line cook snapping on his hairnet, the waitress counting nickels on the table, men in coveralls gulping coffee before heading out to the refinery. Lou leaned against the smudged window, staring out at the road. He ought to call Adele Vignes. Didn’t seem right for her to be ambushed by her own daughter, not after everything she’d already been through. Now Desiree and that dark child. Lord. He reached for the phone.

“You think they fixin to stay?” the line cook asked.

“Who knows? She sure seem in a hurry though,” Lou said. “Wonder what she hurryin to. Look might past me, didn’t wave or nothin.”

“Uppity. And what reason she got to be uppity?”

“Lord,” Lou said. “I never seen a child that black before.”

It was a strange town.

Mallard, named after the ring-necked ducks living in the rice fields and marshes. A town that, like any other, was more idea than place. The idea arrived to Alphonse Decuir in 1848, as he stood in the sugarcane fields he’d inherited from the father who’d once owned him. The father now dead, the now-freed son wished to build something on those acres of land that would last for centuries to come. A town for men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes. A third place. His mother, rest her soul, had hated his lightness; when he was a boy, she’d shoved him under the sun, begging him to darken. Maybe that’s what made him first dream of the town. Lightness, like anything inherited at great cost, was a lonely gift. He’d married a mulatto even lighter than himself. She was pregnant then with their first child, and he imagined his children’s children’s children, lighter still, like a cup of coffee steadily diluted with cream. A more perfect Negro. Each generation lighter than the one before.

Soon others came. Soon idea and place became inseparable, and Mallard carried throughout the rest of St. Landry Parish. Colored people whispered about it, wondered about it. White people couldn’t believe it even existed. When St. Catherine’s was built in 1938, the diocese sent over a young priest from Dublin who arrived certain that he was lost. Didn’t the bishop tell him that Mallard was a colored town? Well, who were these people walking about? Fair and blonde and redheaded, the darkest ones no swarthier than a Greek? Was this who counted for colored in America, who whites wanted to keep separate? Well, how could they ever tell the difference?

By the time the Vignes twins were born, Alphonse Decuir was dead, long gone. But his great-great-great-granddaughters inherited his legacy, whether they wanted to or not. Even Desiree, who complained before every Founder’s Day picnic, who rolled her eyes when the founder was mentioned in school, as if none of that business had anything to do with her. This would stick after the twins disappeared. How Desiree never wanted to be a part of the town that was her birthright. How she felt that you could flick away history like shrugging a hand off your shoulder. You can escape a town, but you cannot escape blood. Somehow, the Vignes twins believed themselves capable of both.

And yet, if Alphonse Decuir could have strolled through the town he’d once imagined, he would have been thrilled by the sight of his great-great-great-granddaughters. Twin girls, creamy skin, hazel eyes, wavy hair. He would have marveled at them. For the child to be a little more perfect than the parents. What could be more wonderful than that?

Ian Hamilton North, IV, was having a bad day. A particularly bad day in what had been a series of bad days. Bad weeks. Who the hell was he kidding? Nothing had been right for months.

He’d bought a place in Tempest, Tennessee, because of its isolation.

The town was too small to disturb the region’s natural beauty: the hills and mountains that looked as though they’d been drizzled in watercolors, the wispy morning mists, extravagant sunsets, and clean air. Unfortunately, there were also people. Some came from families that had lived here for generations, but retirees, artisans, homesteaders, and survivalists had also settled in the mountains. He intended to have minimal contact with all of them, and he’d only come into town on the slim chance that the Dollar General might have the English muffins Bianca craved. The muffins had been missing from the order he paid a fortune to have delivered every week from the closest decent grocery store twenty miles away. But English muffins were too exotic for the Dollar General, and he was in no mood to make the drive to get them.

As he reached his car, he stopped.

The Dancing Dervish.

She was gazing into the window of the Broken Chimney, the town’s so-called coffee shop, a place that also sold ice cream, books, cigarettes, and who knew what else? It was odd. Despite how furious he’d been, he’d noticed the complete absence of joy in Tess Hartsong’s dancing. Her fierce, percussive movements had been tribal, more combat than art. But now she stood still, suspended in a dapple of sunlight, and that quickly, he wanted to paint her.

He could see it. An explosion of color in every brush stroke, every press of the nozzle. Cobalt blue in that fierce gypsy hair, with a touch of viridian green near the temples. Cadmium red brushing her olive skin at the cheekbones, a dab of chrome yellow at their highest point. A streak of ochre shadowing that long nose. Everything in a full palette of colors. And her eyes. The color of ripe August plums. How could he capture the darkness there?

How could he capture anything these days? He was trapped. Imprisoned in his youthful reputation as surely as if he’d been fossilized in amber. He had to get rid of her. And quickly. Before she caught Bianca’s attention more than she already had.

He set off toward the coffee house.

***

Tess knew he was close even before she saw him. It was a stir in the air. A scent. A vibration. And then the surly growl she remembered. “Bianca told me I was incredibly rude this morning.”

“She had to tell you this?”

Tess had been studying the sign in the window of the Broken Chimney when he approached. Close up, he was even more formidable—the opposite of the whippet-thin, garret-living, stereotype of an artist sporting a scraggly goatee, nicotine-stained fingers, and deep-socketed eyes. His shoulders were broad, his jaw rock solid. A long scar ran down the side of his neck, and the small holes in his ear lobes suggested they’d once held earrings. Probably a skull and crossbones. He was an outlaw, the grownup version of the teenage punk who’d holstered a spray paint can instead of a handgun—the young thug who’d spent years in and out of jail for trespassing and felony vandalism. Despite worn jeans and a flannel shirt, this was a man at the top of his game and accustomed to everyone kowtowing to him. Yes, she was intimidated, both by the man himself and by his fame. No, she wouldn’t let him see that.

 “I tend to be self-absorbed…” he said, stating the obvious. “…except as it affects Bianca.” His words had slowed so that each one carried extra weight.

“Really?” This was so none of her business, but from the moment he’d stormed into her yard, he’d raised her hackles. Or maybe she was simply enjoying the freedom of someone glaring at her instead of regarding her with pity. “Dragging a pregnant woman away from her home to a town that doesn’t even have a doctor?”

His ego was too big to be put on the defensive, and he brushed that aside. “She’s not due for another two months, and she’ll have the best care. What she needs most right now is rest and quiet.” His eyes, the unfriendly gray of a winter sky just before a snowstorm, met hers. “I know she invited you to the house, but I’m withdrawing the invitation.”

 Instead of backing away as any normal person would, she pressed. “Why is that?”

“I told you. She needs rest.”

“These days healthy pregnant women are advised to stay active. Isn’t that what her doctor recommended?”

His slight hesitation might have been imperceptible to someone who hadn’t been trained to observe, but not to her. “Bianca’s doctor wants the best for her, and I’m making sure she gets it.” With a curt nod, he walked away, his strong musculature and purposeful stride giving him the look of a man who’d been designed by God to weld girders or pump petroleum instead of creating some of the twenty-first century’s most memorable street art.

Bianca had said he was “overprotective,” but this seemed more like smothering. Something felt wrong between these two.

A muddy pickup sped past blowing exhaust. Tess had come to town for doughnuts, not to become enmeshed in other peoples’ lives, and she returned her attention to the sign in the window.

Help Wanted

She was a midwife. Any day now, her anger, her despair, would fade into resignation. It had to. And as soon as that happened, she’d be ready to look for work in her field. She’d find a job that would let her recapture the satisfaction of helping vulnerable mothers give birth.

Help wanted.

She didn’t need to go back to work yet, so why was she staring at the sign as if her whole messy world had been reduced to this backwater coffee shop?

Because she was scared. The solitude on Runaway Mountain that she’d thought would give her new life wasn’t working out. It had become too tempting to stay in bed. To eat doughnuts and dance in the rain. Last week, she’d gone four days before she’d remembered to take a shower.

The bitter swell of self-disgust ballooning inside her forced her through the door. She could either ask about the job, or—a better idea—she could buy a doughnut and leave.

But Tess Hartsong doesn’t leave.  Instead, she takes her first step into a challenging new life. A life that will force her to deal with a fairy-tale sprite who has too many secrets, a helpless infant, a passel of curious teens, a family of survivalists, and a town suspicious of outsiders, especially one as headstrong as Tess.  Then there’s the biggest challenge of all, Ian Hamilton North, IV.  Like Tess, he’s come to Runaway Mountain to escape.

 Good luck with that.