The Secrets We Keep
By Stephanie
Butland
Sourcebooks Landmark
Women’s Fiction
July 7, 2015
ISBN: 9781492608301
$14.99 Trade Paperback
About the Book
A tragic accident, a broken heart, and a marriage
drowning in secrets...
Mike always walks the dog in the evening while Elizabeth
relaxes in the bathtub--but one night he doesn’t come back. Mike has drowned
while saving a teenage girl named Kate, his dog standing on the bank barking
frantically as the police pull his body from the water.
But despite her husband being lauded as a hero,
Elizabeth can’t wrap her mind around the fact that Mike is gone--and Kate won’t
reveal the details of what really happened that night.
Elizabeth finds herself facing the unfathomable
possibility that she may not have known her husband at all. Does she really
want to know the truth? Or will the weight of Mike’s secrets pull her under?
Purchase Here:
THE SECRETS WE KEEP
About the Author
Stephanie lives in Northumberland, England, and talks
and trains in thinking skills all over Europe, most recently in Kazakhstan. She
has written two books on her experience with cancer, and she is an active
blogger and fundraiser. The Secrets We Keep is her first novel.
Connect with Allegra Jordan
Website - http://stephaniebutland.com/
Twitter – https://twitter.com/under_blue_sky
Praise for End of Innocence
“An emotionally wrenching read that delivers an engaging
story…” –Library Journal
“An immensely powerful, and ultimately uplifting, debut
novel” – Katie Fforde
“I thoroughly enjoyed this.I was completely immersed to
the point it no longer seemed like I was reading but discovering the truth and
lies of these brilliant characters.” – Louise Douglas, Richard
& Judy-selected author of The Secrets Between Us
“[The Secrets We Keep] is a moving exploration of grief and
love and the darker depths that lie beneath the surface of a seemingly idyllic
marriage” – Tamar Cohen, author of The Mistress's Revenge
“I read [The Secrets We Keep] last night in one big
gulp...It's beautiful and sad, the characters so well-drawn, and the writing is
gorgeous. I had to take a deep breath and let out a big sigh when I'd
finished.” – Julie Cohen
Excerpt from THE SECRETS WE KEEP
Chapter 1Blake and Andy hadn't talked about what they would do when they left Elizabeth with her mother-in-law, eight hours after the emergency call from another late-night dog walker reported a young woman, soaked and unconscious, on the bank of Butler's Pond and whipped their world into chaos. They'd obeyed Patricia's stoical instructions-"You know there's nothing you can do for us, so just let us be for a bit"-and gone, leaving the two women side by side on the sofa. Elizabeth was no longer sobbing but making a strange, sad hum of a keening, as though her body had already forgotten how to breathe without also making a cry. Patricia stared straight ahead, eyes glassy, something throbbing in the jut of her jaw.
Even though there's been no discussion, it feels as though there is only one option for the two men. At the gate, Blake says, "Shall we go and have a look?" A question that's not really a question, and they walk the short mile to Butler's Pond in silence as Throckton starts to wake around them.
Andy pulls out his phone. Dials, waits, wonders whether the sound of his wife, sleep-soft and stretching, will be something he can bear. "It's me," he says when she answers, then, after a pause, "Not really. Michael died. Michael drowned." His voice is flat and tight: locked down, for now, until it's safe to start thinking about what's happened. It's too soon to glance at the death of his best friend since childhood for more than a second. Blake matches Andy's steps and listens as he answers Lucy's questions: "I'm with Blake... It looks like an accident... No, I'll go to work... I don't really know, to be honest... OK. Will do." He ends the call and says, "She says I have to make sure I have something to eat before I go to work. She says to say she's thinking of you." Blake nods. Andy redials. He is surprised that his hands are steady. "Me again. I meant to say I love you." He is not the only one, as the news makes its way around Throckton this morning, who will tell someone he loves them. Who will think, There, but for the grace of God, go any of us.
It's still dark, so the floodlit place where Michael drowned and Kate Micklethwaite was saved seems more strange than sad. Kate is in the hospital, vomiting water from her lungs and guts, shivering and unable to speak or focus or do anything but submit to needles and lines and wires, something she will have no memory of. Michael, his body identified by Blake earlier, is already in the morgue, where a pathologist will later confirm what Elizabeth has already been told, that he drowned. Alive when he went into the water, dead when he came out. As simple as that.
So Blake and Andy stand and watch as the grass, the mud, the water are photographed and scrutinized. Although Butler's Pond is generally accepted as a beauty spot, a place for Sunday strolls and dog walking and picnics, this corner of it isn't the prettiest. It's one of those places where rubbish blows to and breeds. The duty officer, recognizing the watchers, offers to lift the tape, but Blake waves him away. They are close enough.
"Unbelievable," Andy says after a while.
"You should never underestimate the water," Blake says.
"He was a bloody idiot to go in there," Andy mutters. They both think of the time six months earlier when Michael, one of the first on the scene of a house fire, had walked into the building and emerged with a mother and baby. Everyone had raged at him-firefighters, senior officers, Elizabeth, Patricia-but he had remained steadfast: someone had to save those people and the fire trucks were six minutes away, which Michael knew was long enough for a toddler to die of smoke inhalation. So he'd gone in.
Blake had been working with Michael that day. He remembered how they had both raised their faces to the wind, asked each other if they smelled smoke, just before the call came in. They both knew the drill: get the neighbors out, keep people away, and wait for the fire department. Never, ever go into anywhere full of smoke unless you are absolutely sure you can get out again. But Michael had gone in, and then there was nothing to do but wait, and hope. The hope had run out just a second before the first fire engine had pulled up. Turning toward the firefighters, he had told them what had happened; turning back, he had seen Michael running up the path, blackened and hacking, propelling a young woman who was herself screaming, every line of her body a prayer as she held forward a child who was silent and still in her arms.
And then the controlled chaos began, the hoses and the water and the aching, burning smoke.
It had been months until Michael had admitted to Andy-it was late, and drunken, and deniable-that there was a moment when he thought he was going to die, and he'd been terrified, and life had never been quite the same since, but he couldn't say exactly why. Andy had put him in a taxi home and they'd never spoken about it again. Now, he wishes that he'd asked more questions.
"I don't think he will have felt anything," Blake says, a catch in his voice.
Andy doesn't know whether he's being asked for a medical opinion or a word of comfort, but he agrees with a nod. And then they turn and walk back to the village, avoiding the eyes of the first curious runners and dog walkers as the light starts to make some real headway into the sky. They make a strange pair-or at least they would, were the overall impression that they gave not one of two men walking home after being up all night, united by something outside themselves. Blake is tall and broad, straight and strong. Only close inspection would show that his uniform is not as crisp as it was when he put it on before walking to work sixteen hours ago. His cap hides his receding hairline and so he looks younger than his forty-seven years when he's wearing it. The shadow of the peak hides the shadows under, and in, his eyes. Next to him, Andy seems slight and short, although there's only four inches' height difference, but the doctor is walking with his head down, letting his tiredness show, wearing mismatched clothes, his pale skin made paler by his thick eyebrows and dark brown hair.
He'd gotten dressed in a hurry in the dark, fumbling for quietness and struggling to make the words he'd just heard make sense. "I'm asking you as their friend," Blake had said, "but your medical eye might help. I don't want an on-call doctor if I can have someone she knows here. Just in case. Come and see what you think."
Lucy had sat up in bed and switched on the light as he was searching the bottom of the wardrobe for his shoes. "So the boys sleep, for once, and now you're the one who is waking me up," she'd said, and he'd told her, more simply and quickly than he would have liked to, his own shock speaking, what had happened. Michael, their best man, godfather to their twins, here one minute, dead in the dark water the next. Lucy's eyes, rounding as she listened. Her pushing him away-"go, go to Elizabeth, see what you can do, tell her"-and then she'd hesitated, because, well, tell her what? Andy had kissed the top of her head and gone, sat for a moment longer than he needed to on the top stair, fastening his laces, finding what he needed for what would come next, realizing he was just going to have to do it anyway.
"I have to go back to the station," Blake says when they reach the market square. "You?"
"I don't know." There's time for Andy to go home, take a shower, watch cartoons with the boys, and tell Lucy he's all right: there's time to touch them, all three of them, just the simplest stroke of hair or brush of hand that might help. But he's not sure he trusts himself. "I think I'll go have half an hour at the office before I start." The bed in the consulting room will be too narrow to be properly comfortable; the staff shower will run out of hot water before he has finished washing. Better, safer, for now.
"I'll look in on Elizabeth later," Blake says. "I can take Pepper out when I walk Hope."
"I'll call on my way home," Andy says. And, even though they see each other often, they shake hands as they part.
• • •
"It's terrible that we have to be practical, but we do," Patricia says later. Elizabeth nods but doesn't agree. She's barely moved from the place Blake steered her to when he brought the news. Every now and then Patricia picks up the balled tissues that lie around her daughter-in-law. Every now and then she stops to have a few tears herself, caught unawares by something she comes across: her son's handwriting on the notepad in the kitchen, his muddy sneakers by the back door. Early on the first day, the phone had rung, and neither she nor Elizabeth had gone to answer it. Instead they'd sat, transfixed by the sound of Michael's recorded voice, cheerfully telling the caller that they'd get back to him or her as soon as they could. It was the only time that Patricia had been comforted by Elizabeth: what seemed horrifying to the newly childless mother gladdened the widow who afterward, during the night, would switch the answering machine on again, sit on the bottom step, and call the number from her cell phone over and over, until her husband's voice became like a blanket, the words heard so often that they became meaningless, but the sound warm and soothing.
Less than forty-eight hours from the knock on the door that would always mark the Before and After of Elizabeth's adult life, she's had conversations about identifying Michael (which Blake has done), the inquest (opened and adjourned), the funeral (a week away), visiting the funeral home (which everyone seems to think she should do), her sister coming over from Australia (which everyone seems to think Mel should do), and the girl Michael saved (hospitalized, shocked, and distressed, but not in any physical danger). She has agreed to meet the vicar, the funeral director, and Michael's boss. She has flinched from every mention of death, or body, or even any use of the past tense as far as Michael is concerned. She feels as though she is being asked to do an awful lot of adult things at a time when she has never been less able to do them. When she looks in the desk for the envelope Michael had put there-If Michael dies first written across it in large letters, next to the one marked If Elizabeth dies first and which she runs her hands over, wishing, wishing that it had been her, so she didn't have to bear any of this-she cries again. But these tears are not grief: they are gratitude. Elizabeth remembers the afternoon Michael had sat them down and suggested they do this.
It was not long after they'd married, and she'd laughed at him, but when she'd seen the look on his face, when he'd said, "Elizabeth, you and I of all people know how suddenly people can be lost," she'd felt ashamed of herself and taken the job seriously. They'd both already lost a parent. They'd each put a copy of their will in the envelopes. Then Michael had photocopied the details of their burial plot so they each had a copy of that.
"Seriously?" Elizabeth had asked when he'd bought the plot. "We could have a great weekend away for that money."
"Yes," he'd said, "but a space in a graveyard is forever." They'd written lists of who they wanted to have their possessions. They'd chosen hymns and poems and laughed about how Elizabeth's choice of "All Things Bright and Beautiful" would go down in Throckton. "It will make you smile," she'd said, "and Mel and I used to sing it every Sunday at church. We chose it for our mother's funeral. It's our theme song. Throckton will just have to lump it." When it was done, they'd sealed the envelopes and gone to bed with a bottle of wine.
Elizabeth is so glad of the envelope. Instead of making decisions she can brandish sheets of paper at people. No to medical research, no to an official police funeral, no to cremation. Yes to "Abide with Me" and "The Lord's My Shepherd" and being buried in his uniform. She decides that if it isn't in the envelope, it doesn't matter, and lets Patricia choose caterers and cars and go through her wardrobe and pick out something for her to wear for the funeral. Between conversations, she sits, mostly quiet, and waits. Waits for this not to be true.
• • •
Elizabeth has never been to a funeral home before. She and Patricia enter the building together and then take turns going into the room. Patricia goes first and comes out swollen-faced and silent, nodding and clasping Elizabeth's hands. So, still unsure, she rises and faces the oak-effect door.
It's a smaller room than she thinks it will be. The light is low, and the smell of flowers, from a complex arrangement in which some of the smaller blooms are dying, is a mixture of sweetness and must. There's a cross. And there's a seat, next to the coffin. Because there's a coffin. There's a coffin. Elizabeth closes her eyes and tries to make herself breathe. She looks again. Yes, there's a coffin. Mike's coffin. Her soul winces. The top part is open, the rest closed.
Experimentally, Elizabeth puts her hand on the wood near the bottom, where she would imagine Mike's feet to be, were she able to think about his cold, dead feet in a box. She checks her heart and feels nothing new, nothing worse. She takes a step farther up. Her hand is where his knees would be. The wood is smooth. Her palm runs up thigh, over stomach, rests on chest, in a horrible pantomime of what she's done so often in life. Her mind is saying, Well, if Mike was gone, this is how it would be, yes, but he can't be gone. He can't be.
Elizabeth knows what needs to come next. So she takes another step, and she looks down.
Mike's face is swollen, only slightly, and an odd color, although that might be the light. Blake had driven them the short distance, neither of them ready for the walk, or the people, or the light of an ordinary day. He had told them in the car that Mike would look as though he was sleeping, but this face, solemn and enclosed, bears no resemblance to her sprawling, duvet-hogging, snoring husband, liable at any moment to throw out an arm and pull her in to him, even though he was fast asleep.
Elizabeth realizes she is holding her breath as she fights to recognize what's in front of her. Cautious, she reaches out her left hand, her own skin dull in this dull light. She touches his face. Her thumb strokes the indentation to the left of his right cheekbone. He is cold, and his skin is powdery, and she watches, waiting for him to open his eyes. Tears fall from hers and gather on his face, and she wipes them away gently with the thumb that wears his wedding ring, and just for a moment these are his tears, and they are crying together.
Elizabeth bends down and whispers, "You can pretend all you like, but I know you haven't left me. I know you wouldn't leave me."
She whispers, "I want to hold your hand." Her own hands, free to rake through her hair and twist around each other and catch at tears falling from her chin, tingle at the horrible thought of being contained in the way his are.
She whispers, "Show me that you haven't gone," and she sits, and she waits, her hand on the coffin where she thinks Michael's hand must be. She closes her eyes. "You promised you would never leave me," she says, trying a different tack, thinking a prod might work where a plea has failed. Time stops, and the world stops, and even the tears stop for a while, as Elizabeth strains for a sign, all of her senses ready and oh so willing. But no sign comes.
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