Everything I Left Unsaid is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Bantam Books Trade Paperback Original
Copyright © 2015 by Molly Fader
Excerpt from The Truth About Him by M. O’Keefe copyright © 2015 by Molly Fader
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
BANTAM BOOKS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book The Truth About Him by M. O’Keefe. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
O’Keefe, Molly.
Everything I left unsaid : a novel / M. O’Keefe.
pages cm
“A Bantam Books trade paperback original”—Verso title page.
ISBN 978-1-101-88448-5 (paperback)—ISBN 978-1-101-88449-2 (eBook) 1. Runaway wives—Fiction. 2. Abused wives—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3615.K44E38 2015
813’.6—dc23
2015007597
eBook ISBN 9781101884492
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Karin Batten, adapted for eBook
Cover design: Caroline Teagle
Cover photograph: © Gabriel Georgescu/Shutterstock
v4.1
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part Two
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Dedication
Acknowledgments
By M. O’Keefe
About the Author
Excerpt from The Truth About Him
ANNIE
Escape smelled like a thick layer of Febreze over stale cigarette smoke.
I dropped my duffle bag on the patch of linoleum in front of the trailer’s stove and closed the thin metal door behind me. It didn’t latch the first time and I had to slam it.
The whole trailer shook.
I’ll need better locks.
Not that locks had kept me safe before. Locks and sitting very still and being very small had not kept me safe at all.
Everyone minds their own here. They all keep to themselves. That’s what Kevin, the park manager, had said when I put down my cash for the trailer. It’s safe and it’s quiet and we don’t truck with no nonsense.
Safe, quiet, and no nonsense made this little scrap of swamp a perfect place to end my week of helter-skelter traveling. Doubling back, buying a ticket west only to go east. Buses. Trains.
Out in front of my trailer, there was a used car—a POS Toyota with bad brakes and a broken radio. I bought it in Virginia, from a high school football player with dreams the crappy car could not hold, and drove north before heading south again.
But I had to stop somewhere. I couldn’t drive forever.
So, seven days, hundreds of miles to here. To this place that didn’t even show up on a state map of North Carolina.
“Home sweet home,” I sighed, putting my hands on my hips and surveying my new kingdom.
Kevin called it a trailer, but really it was an old RV that had rolled to a stop at the Flowered Manor Trailer Park and Camp Ground and refused to keep going. Someone had taken off the wheels and put the RV up on blocks and maybe that same someone had carefully, lovingly planted the morning glory vines to hide those cement blocks.
The flowers were a nice touch, admirable really in their delusional quality, but didn’t much hide the fact that it was an RV.
A crappy one. In a crappy trailer park so off the beaten path it was practically impossible to find.
Perfect. So, so perfect.
My deep breath shuddered through me and I allowed some of the fear I lived with to lift away, like crows startled from a winter field. Usually I gathered the fear back because fear kept me safe.
Fear was familiar.
But in this crazy little trailer, there was no need.
We don’t truck with no nonsense.
Good, I thought, smiling for the first time in a long time. Bravado making me giddy. Neither do I.
I also didn’t truck with the smell of this place.
It was two steps from the kitchen to the dining area and I leaned over the Formica table and beige banquette seating to pull back the curtains and yank open the windows. A fetid breeze blew through, slipping across my neck and down the collar of my white cotton shirt.
I closed my eyes because I was tired down to my bones and…it felt good. The breeze, on my skin…it just felt good. Different.
And these days I was in the business of different.
My entire life I’d had long hair against my neck or pulled back in a ponytail so heavy it made my head hurt. My hair was naturally red and curly and thick. So thick.
Suffocatingly thick.
Mom used to say it was the prettiest thing about me. Which is one of those kinds of compliments that isn’t really a compliment at all, because it leaves so much room for awful to grow up around it. But it was the nicest thing she said about me, so I took it to heart, because she was my mom.
Chopping it off had been a weird relief. Not just from headaches and the heat, but this new butchered hair allowed me to feel the breeze like I never had before. The sun against the nape of my neck was a revelation.
When the wind blew, my short hair lifted and the feeling rippled down my back, like a domino fall of nerve endings.
I liked it. A lot.
The quiet was broken by the distant, muffled sound of a phone ringing.
It wasn’t mine. I’d left my cell in the bottom of a trash can in the Tulsa bus station. The other trailers were close, but not so close that I’d be able to hear a cell phone ringing in a purse. And that’s what it sounded like.
The counters of my small kitchen were empty. The driver and front-seat-passenger captain seats that had been turned to create a little sitting area were both bare.