Truths I Never Told You (ARC) Read online

  Praise for Kelly Rimmer

  The Things We Cannot Say

  “An intense story of survival, hardship, and heartbreak, The Things We Cannot Say is sure to evoke emotion in even the most cynical reader.”

  —New York Journal of Books

  “Straddling the past and the present, The Things We Cannot Say is a mesmerizing tale of family, memory, forgiveness, and unconditional love, but it is also about retrieving lost stories…a true achievement in World War II fiction.”

  — Historical Novel Society

  “Fans of Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale and Pam Jenoff’s The Orphan’s Tale will enjoy this absorbing, emotional tale of love, heartbreak, and resilience.”

  —Booklist

  “Kelly Rimmer has outdone herself. I thought that Before I Let You Go was one of the best novels I had ever read…[but] if you only have time to read one book this year The Things We Cannot Say should be that book. Keep tissues handy.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “Fans of The Nightingale and Lilac Girls will adore The Things We Cannot Say.”

  — Pam Jenoff, New York Times bestselling author

  “Kelly Rimmer has raised the already high bar with this unforgettable novel.

  Fans of Jodi Picoult and Kristin Hannah now have a new go-to author.”

  — Bestselling author Sally Hepworth

  Before I Let You Go

  “Ripped from the headlines and from the heart, Before I Let You Go is an unforgettable novel that will amaze and startle you with its impact and insight.”

  — Patti Callahan Henry, New York Times bestselling author You #37377 page 1

  “Kelly Rimmer writes with wisdom and compassion about the relationships

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  between sisters, mother and daughter… . She captures the anguish of

  addiction, the agonizing conflict between an addict’s best and worst selves.”

  — Luanne Rice, New York Times bestselling author

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  “Kelly Rimmer’s shimmering and poignant new novel broadens our current

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  national conversation about seeking to combat the deadly yet curable disease of addiction while being ultimately a story of relationships.”

  —Library Journal, Editor’s Pick

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  Also by Kelly Rimmer

  THE THINGS WE CANNOT SAY

  BEFORE I LET YOU GO

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  TRUTHS I NEVER

  TOLD YOU

  Kelly Rimmer

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  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and

  destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the

  publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  Recycling programs

  ISBN-13: 978-1-525-80460-1

  for this product may

  not exist in your area.

  Truths I Never Told You

  Copyright © 2020 by Lantana Management Pty Ltd

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Graydon House Books, 22 Adelaide St. West, 40th Floor, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5H 4E3.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the You #37377 page 4

  product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely Told

  coincidental.

  ® and TM are trademarks of Harlequin Enterprises Limited or its corporate affiliates.

  Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and in other countries.

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  Printed in U.S.A.

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  TRUTHS I NEVER

  TOLD YOU

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  For the women who carry infants in their arms as

  they battle illness in their minds.

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  Prologue

  Grace

  September 14th, 1957

  I am alone in a crowded family these days, and that’s the worst feeling I’ve ever experienced. Until these past few years, I had no idea that loneliness is worse than sadness. I’ve come to realize that’s because loneliness, by its very definition, cannot be shared.

  Tonight there are four other souls in this house, but I am unreachably far from any of them, even as I’m far too close to guarantee their safety.

  Patrick said he’d be home by nine tonight, and I clung on to that promise all day. He’ll be home at nine. You won’t do anything crazy

  if Patrick is here, so just hold on until nine. I should have known

  better than to rely on that man by now. It’s 11:55p.m., and I have no

  idea where he is.

  Beth will be wanting a feed soon and I’m just so tired, I’m already

  bracing myself—as if the sound of her cry will be the thing that undoes me, instead of something I should be used to after four children. I feel the fear of that cry in my very bones—a kind of whole-body tension I Truths I N_9781525804601_ITP_txt_275977.indd 9

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  Kelly Rimmer

  can’t quite make sense of. When was the last time I had more than a few hours’ sleep? Twenty-four hours a day I am fixated on the terror that I will snap and hurt someone: Tim, Ruth, Jeremy, Beth…or myself. I am

  a threat to my children’s safety, but at the same time, their only protection from that very same threat.

  I have learned a hard lesson these past few years; the more difficult life is, the louder your feelings become. On an ordinary day, I trust facts more than feelings, but when the world feels like it’s ending, it’s hard to dis-tinguish where my thoughts are even coming from. Is this fear grounded in reality,
or is my mind playing tricks on me again? There’s no way for me to be sure. Even the line between imagination and reality has worn

  down and it’s now too thin to delineate.

  Sometimes I think I will walk away before something bad happens,

  as if removing myself from the equation would keep them all safe. But then Tim will skin his knee and come running to me, as if a simple hug could take all the world’s pain away. Or Jeremy will plant one of those sloppy kisses on my cheek, and I am reminded that for better or worse, I am his world. Ruth will slip my handbag over her shoulder as she follows me around the house, trying to walk in my footsteps, because to her, I seem like someone worth imitating. Or Beth will look up at me with

  that gummy grin when I try to feed her, and my heart contracts with a

  love that really does know no bounds.

  Those moments remind me that everything changes, and that this

  cloud has come and gone twice now, so if I just hang on, it will pass again. I don’t feel hope yet, but I should know hope, because I’ve walked this path before and even when the mountains and valleys seemed unsurmountable, I survived them.

  I’m constantly trying to talk myself around to calm, and sometimes,

  for brief and beautiful moments, I do. But the hard, cold truth is that every time the night comes, it seems blacker than it did before.

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  Tonight I’m teetering on the edge of something horrific.

  Tonight the sound of my baby’s cry might just be the thing that breaks me altogether.

  I’m scared of so many things these days, but most of all now, I fear myself.

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  Beth

  1996

  “What’s the place…you know…where is the place? What…

  today? No? It’s now. The place.”

  Dad babbles an endless stream of words that don’t quite make

  sense as I push his wheelchair through his front door. My brother

  Tim and I exchange a glance behind his back and then we share

  a resigned sigh. Our father’s speech sounds coherent enough if

  you don’t listen too closely—the rhythms of it are still right and

  his tone is clear, it’s the words themselves he can’t quite grasp

  these days, and the more upset he gets, the less sense he makes.

  The fact that he’s all-but speaking gibberish today actually makes

  a lot of sense, but it’s still all kinds of heartbreaking.

  The grandfather clock in the kitchen has just chimed 5 p.m.

  I’m officially late to pick my son up from my mother-in-law’s

  house, and Dad was supposed to be at the nursing home two

  hours ago. We were determined to give him the dignity to

  leave his house on his own terms and this morning Dad made

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  it very clear that he wanted to be left alone in his room to pack

  for the move.

  Tim and I promised one another we’d be patient, and for four

  and a half hours, we were patient. He pottered around the back-

  yard doing overdue yardwork—weeding the chaos around the

  bases of the conifers, scooping up the pinecones, reshaping the

  hedge that’s run completely amok. Dad’s house is in Bellevue,

  east of Seattle. Over the last little while he’s been too ill to tend

  his own yard and we’ve confirmed my long-held suspicion that

  nature would entirely swallow up the manicured gardens in this

  region within just a few months if humans disappeared. While

  Tim tried to wrangle some order back to the gardens outside, I

  vigorously mopped the polished floors, vacuumed the carpet in

  the bedrooms and sorted the fresh food in Dad’s fridge to dis-

  tribute among my siblings.

  But every time I stuck my head through Dad’s bedroom door,

  I found him sitting on his bed beside his mostly empty suitcase.

  At first, he was calm and seemed to be thoughtfully processing

  the change that was coming. He wears this quiet, childlike smile

  a lot of the time now, and for the first few hours, that smile was

  firmly fixed on his face, even as he looked around, even as he

  sat in silence. As the hours passed, though, the suitcase remained

  empty, save for a hat and two pairs of socks.

  “I can’t…where is the…” He started looking around his room,

  searching desperately for something he couldn’t name, let alone

  find. He kept lifting his right hand into the air, clenched in a

  fist. We couldn’t figure out what he wanted, Dad couldn’t fig-

  ure out how to tell us and the more he tried, the more out of

  breath he became until he was gasping for air between each con-

  fused, tortured word. The innocent smile faded from his face

  and his distress gradually turned to something close to panic.

  Tim helped him back into his wheelchair and pushed him to the

  living room, sitting him right in front of the television, playing

  one of his beloved black-and-white movies on the VCR to dis-

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  Kelly Rimmer

  tract him. I stayed in the bedroom, sobbing quietly as I finished

  the packing my father obviously just couldn’t manage.

  This morning Dad understood that he was moving to the

  nursing home, and although he’d made it clear he didn’t want

  to go, he seemed to understand that he had to. This afternoon

  he’s just lost, and I can’t bear much more of this. I’m starting

  to rush Dad, because I’ve finally accepted that we need to get

  this over and done with. I guess after a day of getting nowhere,

  I’m ready to resort to the “rip the Band-Aid off” approach to

  admitting him to hospice care. I push his wheelchair quickly

  away from the door, down the ramp my sister Ruth built over

  the concrete stairs, down to the path that cuts across the grass

  on the front yard.

  “Lock the wall,” Dad says, throwing the words over his shoul-

  der to Tim. In the past few weeks, I’ve found myself arguing

  with Dad, trying to correct him when he mixes his words up

  like this. Tim’s told me not to bother—Dad can’t help it, and

  correcting him won’t actually fix the problem. My brother is

  definitely much better at communicating with Dad than I am.

  He calls back very gently,

  “I’m locking the door. Don’t worry.”

  “Sorry about that,” Dad says, suddenly sounding every bit as

  weary as I feel.

  “It’s okay, Dad,” Tim calls as he jogs down the path to catch

  up to us.

  “No work today, Timmy?” Tim hasn’t been Timmy for at least twenty years, except at family functions when our brother Jeremy wants to rile him up. Forty-two and forty-one respectively

  and with several graduate degrees between them, my brothers

  still revert to adolescent banter whenever they’re in the same

  room. Today, I can only wish Dad was teasing Tim playfully

  the way Jeremy does when he slips back into that old nickname.

  “I have the day off today,” Tim says quietly.

  “Are we going to t
he…that thing…” Dad’s brows knit. He

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  searches for the right word, waving his hand around vaguely

  in the air in front of him, then his shoulders slump as he sighs

  heavily. “Are we going to the green place?”

  “The golf course? No, Dad. Not today. We’re going to the

  nursing home, remember?”

  We only realized Dad had dementia earlier this year, and at

  times like this, I’m horrified all over again that it took us so long

  to figure it out. He had a heart attack four years ago, and in the

  aftermath, was diagnosed with heart failure. His deterioration

  has been steady despite medication and cardiac rehab, and with

  the changes in his physical health have come significant changes

  in his personality and, we thought, cognitive function. He’d

  been losing words the whole time, but his mind seemed intact

  otherwise. And who doesn’t search for a word every now and

  again? What exactly is the tipping point between “not as sharp

  as you used to be” and “neurologically deficient”?

  Tim’s an orthopedic surgeon, and given his years of extensive

  medical training he could probably answer that question in ex-

  cruciating detail, but his eyes are suspiciously shiny right now

  as we walk Dad to the car, so I don’t ask.

  Dad sighs heavily and turns his attention back to me. He’s on

  permanent oxygen supplementation now, the cannula forever

  nestled in his nostrils. Sometimes I forget it’s there, and then

  when I look at his face, I’m startled all over again by the visual

  reminders that it’s really happening—Dad is really dying. The

  evidence is undeniable now…the cannula, the swelling around

  his face, the sickly gray-white tone in his skin.

  “Where’s Noah?” he asks me.

  “He’s at Chiara’s house.” My mother-in-law worships my

  son—her third grandchild, first grandson. Today, when I

  dropped Noah off, she barely looked at him—instead she threw

  her arms around me and hugged me for so long that eventually,

  I had to disentangle myself to make a hasty exit. I like Chiara

  and we have a great relationship. It just turns out that I really

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