Preview of The Break by Katie Sise

Preview of The Break by Katie Sise

One

Rowan. Monday afternoon. November 7th.

I became a mystery writer when my dad was killed. His murder flipped me like a switch. The wondering, the imagining, the plotting: all of it is what I do, what I’ve always done. Or at least, that’s what I say in interviews.

But sometimes I lie in bed in the thick, creeping hours after midnight and wonder if that’s really the whole truth. We tell ourselves all kinds of stories about our past. And maybe we even convince ourselves they’re true. I tell myself and everyone else that I live in the sordid worlds of my novels because of my father’s stabbing. That I write mysteries with heroines who solve them because I could never solve his murder.

I have no idea if these things make me a good writer or a good liar.

I don’t remember much about becoming a mother a few weeks ago, only passing out in the street and hearing sirens as I bled. And then three days ago, I lost my mind and accused our beautiful, twenty-two-year-old babysitter, June, of harming our newborn. But June hadn’t done anything. Which is why Sylvie Alvarez, PhD, PsyD, is sitting here in my daughter Lila’s nursery, making sure I’m fit to take care of her.

Sylvie sips lavender tea on a plush leather pouf, staring at my face while my husband, Gabe, hovers in the background like a linebacker. He’s too big for this nursery with its small things, with our small baby. Sylvie’s supposed to be one of the best psychologists in New York City, and she’s here as a favor because we know her college roommate. Gabe begged her to come for a house call so we wouldn’t have to take the baby out in the cold.

I still can’t remember the birth. I remember the knives and the blood and the feeling of cold air against my skin when they raced me into the operating room. Gabe has told me most of what happened, but I get the sense he’s trying to downplay how badly it went. Not only the emergency surgery, but the part when I woke up from the anesthesia and the doctors set a howling baby girl on my chest and I started screaming at the top of my lungs and wouldn’t stop. As Gabe tells it, I started flailing so wildly they had to take away Lila and sedate me again. Sometimes I don’t believe Gabe, but I believe that. The only thing I remember about that flicker of a moment was how slippery Lila was, and how trying to keep her safe in my arms was like trying to hold water. The surgical knives were still out, glinting maniacally in the corner of my vision, and I was terrified because she was all I’d ever wanted.

“If you want to talk about what happened with your sitter,” Sylvie’s saying, her voice smooth like butter. “If you’re ready to talk about June. If you remember.”

I stare at Sylvie, at the crows’ feet that spike the golden brown skin around her eyes. I’m perched at the edge of the nursing chair, my body coiled like a spring that could burst free and escape with Lila if I needed to. I kiss the top of Lila’s head, my mouth against her dark, downy hair. I want to squeeze her against my chest and bury my head in the curve of her neck, to breathe in the smell of her skin and never stop. But I worry Sylvie will sense something’s still terribly wrong with me, and if she thinks I can’t take care of Lila then it’s all over: they’ll take her from me. Or they’ll lock me up in a ward and give her to Gabe, and he doesn’t deserve her. I know that’s an awful thing to say.

“Of course I remember what happened,” I say, and in my mind’s eyes I see June: her heart-shaped face with bright green eyes like sun on ocean water, her tanned skin smoothed by youth and luck-of-the-draw genetics, and her laugh—tinkling, almost. June was so magnetic.

Is, I remind myself.

June’s alive. You didn’t kill her, Rowan, did you?

I close my eyes, but that makes it worse because June lights up the darkness behind my lids: a flick of straw-colored hair over her shoulder, bracelets stacked on her skinny wrists so that she jangled when she moved from room to room in our apartment carrying Lila. Thinking of what I did to her feels like torture.

“June’s okay now, right?” I ask Sylvie, my heart pounding, Lila warm in my arms. Too warm? I set my palm against the back of her neck, like I’ve seen other mothers do to try to find a fever. “You told me that yesterday,” I say, blinking. “That’s still true, right?”

Sylvie dunks her tea bag. “Your sitter is fine,” she says, like it’s nothing.

That open window. What if I had done something to June that night? I was so terrified, so sure she’d hurt Lila. “You remember?” Sylvie asks, prodding me with eyebrows up, waiting.

Gabe looks away like he can’t bear to hear the story again. I can feel the shift of his attention like a physical force inside the nursery, a riptide. He doesn’t look me in the eye anymore.

Thunk goes something out in the kitchen, and I flinch. Now that I’ve scared June away, Gabe’s mother Elena is back. She’s banging around pots and pans like she’s cooking, but she’s more likely sneaking trips to the closed nursery door to listen in on our therapy session. I want my own mother, but she’s too far gone, eating stewed green beans in a care facility uptown.

I touch the smooth curve of Lila’s fingernail. “I do,” I say, because of all the things I can’t recall leading up to the birth and the moment I nearly died delivering Lila—beeping monitors, all those masked faces over me—I can remember exactly what I did to June two days ago, the way her slim shoulders felt in my grip, and how her tendons and bones felt like they were made of nothing at all, like a hollow bird skeleton I could smash between my fingertips. I remember shaking her shoulders and screaming awful things into her crumpled, beautiful face:

The baby’s gone!

What have you done?

I remember pushing June toward the window as she struggled against me. I didn’t want to hurt her, but we got way too close to the sixth-floor window, which was open because I kept worrying Lila would overheat. I can still feel the warning snap of cold from the wind; it was one of the first freezing days of November, the air charged with impending winter, already dark at five, making people like me want to cry for the lack of daylight. And if I hadn’t looked down right then to see Lila sleeping soundly in her bassinet, if I hadn’t snapped out of it . . .

“The window,” I say to Sylvie, needing to fill the silence with words. “The bay window in our living room was open, and I was pushing June toward it because I was so upset, I didn’t want to hurt her or anything like that, I was just trying so hard to figure out what had happened to Lila. I remember how Gabe rushed into the room when he heard me shouting, and how he stopped dead when he saw us. June was sobbing, snot everywhere,” I say. I’m not sure why I mention the snot detail. Maybe because it was the first I’d ever seen June not look beautiful. “And Gabe asked us what happened, and then June started for the door and Gabe tried to stop her, but she slipped by him.”

And then she opened our apartment door, where two neighbors had already gathered in the hallway because of the noise.

She accused me of hurting your baby, Gabe, June had said, and I cringe to remember it. I know Sylvie sees it.

“I remember my thoughts felt disjointed,” I say. “It was like I couldn’t get a hold of them. And then I looked down, and I saw Lila, and she was okay.”

My throat squeezes. Lila stirs in my arms, letting out a sleepy cry that pulls me out of the bloodied past and into the moment. She opens and closes her mouth like a fish, and I know she wants to eat. I’m still too new at nursing to be comfortable doing it in front of Sylvie, but I can’t let her go hungry, so I unbutton my shirt and put her on my breast. The latch isn’t quite right, and I wince with pain. Heat flames through my limbs.

Mercifully Sylvie doesn’t say anything. Neither does Gabe, though I know he notices. I wish he would come to me, rub my back, or maybe get me a glass of water.

“What made you think June had tried to harm your baby, Rowan?” Sylvie asks, her voice so quiet I can barely hear it.

I look down at Lila, at her rosebud mouth moving against my chest, born knowing how to nurse somewhere deep inside her brain, all instinct. I stare at her perfect face. I write for a living, and I still have no words other than clichés to describe my daughter:

Perfect.

Everything.

Heavenly.

Mine.

“I have no fucking idea,” I say softly.

Sylvie shifts her weight on the pouf. She doesn’t look comfortable. The furniture is gorgeous, but not exactly a great place to set down your body and rest. Sometimes when I glance around everything feels wrong, like I accidentally chose the wrong life—the wrong man?—and now I can’t claw my way back to everything that was meant to be.

But that can’t be right: I love Gabe, and I certainly love Lila. Everything is as it’s supposed to be. And I’ll get better, I will. I have to believe that.

Preview of The Break by Katie Sise