Catch up on the previous chapters here
Nell saw the way Kent kept looking at her on the bus ride back to their apartment, but he didn’t say anything. He let her keep her mouth shut until they got off, and walked hand-in-hand a couple more blocks, and she got out her keys and opened the first door, and they went up the stairs so she could open the second door, and as they took off their shoes and hung up their keys and put their bags away.
Then he just stood there in the little entryway, head cocked and eyebrows raised.
“It’s fine.”
“Penelope.”
She shook her head and went into the kitchen to check the fridge. “I’m reading too much into it, that’s all. Rosie’s a senior at K, she’s majoring in Classics, she studied in Rome …”
Silence. Kent was good at using silence.
“She’s about five four, he gives her a weight but it’s probably wrong, says she’s solid because he doesn’t want to say fat, long blonde hair, wears hoodies and jeans and Converse, takes the bus to campus every day even though she’s got a car parked right there in her space in the apartment lot …”
More silence.
Nell made a unilateral decision and went for the freezer instead. Sweet and sour chicken and spring rolls, check. “Rosie’s got a grandmother a couple hours away, but no other family. Plus her roommate’s, like, practically a stranger, because housing fell through.”
“Nell …”
She checked the cooking instructions on the spring rolls and started punching numbers on the microwave. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
The floorboards squeaked as Kent went back to the second bedroom and then returned with the laptop they shared, setting it on the kitchen island. “O’Connell?” he asked, opening it up and waiting for the old machine to boot.
“C. J. Since You Went Away.” Because no, she hadn’t Googled it yet. Things could still be a coincidence. Hey, if it wasn’t a coincidence, then this was still one heck of a coincidence. Unless O’Connell sent it to Pending because he knew she worked there. “We’re jumping at shadows,” she murmured, but Nell could barely hear herself over the whir of the microwave.
Kent typed, clicked, scrolled, clicked again, and frowned.
Seriously, enough with the silence. “What?”
“There’s no photo.” He turned the laptop around so she could see the book’s title, and apparently the real cover—a zoomed-out version of the color-blocked full cover on the advance copy, showing an apartment building far taller than should be in Kalamazoo—with more words underneath. “He doesn’t have an author photo. That’s one thing if he’s writing under a pseudonym, but if he’s going to be doing readings and showing his face …”
“Doesn’t Chuck Tingle do events with a bag over his head?”
Kent shook his head a little and started clicking and typing something else. “Very different backstory there. O’Connell’s a debut novelist with nothing else attached to his name. Everything says first book, there’s nothing—yeah, see?” He gestured at the screen even though it was turned so no, she couldn’t actually see. “A bunch of people are asking the same question. Who is this guy? Is the author actually the narrator? Is …?”
Nell waited as she rotated the spring rolls, but seriously. “Is?” she prompted.
He turned the laptop back around so she could read the headline. Is Rosie Real? And, underneath that, in slightly smaller font: Advance readers of C. J. O’Connell’s debut novel ask how much of this emotional tribute to a lost love is truly fictional. “There’s already a hashtag,” he said tonelessly when she just kept staring. “#FindRosie.”
She tried to lick her lips, but her tongue was dry and swallowing hurt. “Look, we can’t … we aren’t actually saying this.”
“Nell …”
“After a couple chapters and a couple Google searches?” she persisted. “You’re not actually … come on. It’s not the same story anyway. Emotional tribute? What did Brandon say—tender? Something about being tender? It can’t be.”
“Is Rosie’s bus always late in the morning?”
Forgetting herself, she tried to swallow again. “Yeah, but …”
“What’s the bus driver’s name?”
Margaret. The bus driver’s name had been Margaret. Not Meg, not Marge, not Peggy—Margaret. “The book doesn’t say.” Yet, at least. But she hadn’t read far enough into the year for that to matter, anyway.
The newspapers reported it on Friday, October 26: Margaret Renee Henderson had been murdered, likely on the previous Wednesday, and her live-in boyfriend—who’d recently fought with her and moved out—had been arrested.
“Look, fiction can imagine anything,” she burst out. “Maybe somebody went back through the papers and found the crimes and just … look, there was that one K prof who wrote the novel about the Raines brothers based on a real case.”
Kent gestured to the laptop. “There’s nothing in there that says O’Connell, if that’s his real name, was inspired by a real case. Or even if he’s from Kalamazoo, or was living there in 2018 when all this started, or …” He shook his head. “It’s too damn close to the truth for it not to be influenced by it, but if he read about it and liked it and, what, took the murders out? Turned it into the kind of love story you’d find on Art’s wall?”
“We’re not saying that because I’m not nearly far enough into it to say that,” she all but snapped back. “It’s just—it’s a book Art got in the mail because of the stupid missed connection thing, which means it’s a love story, because nobody would send a freaking serial killer novel to a place like his, okay? And it just—ugh.” She turned away and started opening the cupboards like she’d forgotten where they kept the plates. “It’s nothing, and even if it’s not nothing, it’s a coincidence, because if it’s not a coincidence …”
“Hey, babe.” He got up so quickly the stool toppled over, and the clatter made her flinch, and that was it. That was enough. The fragile hold she’d had on herself, that oh God please no feeling, broke. It wasn’t tears—it was shivering and shuddering in the circle of Kent’s arms, because, seriously, that was all ages ago. All of them, Margaret and Trevor and Kelsey and Ashleigh and Heidi, that was all years ago, in another state, another time, another life, and this couldn’t … it honestly couldn’t …
Nell struggled to control her breath because she had to say something, to encompass it in words and make it manageable. “He wouldn’t … confess to freaking … serial murder in … a novel,” she managed, spitting out the syllables with as much breath as her lungs let her draw, and there, good. It was out: the phrase neither of them had uttered since coming to Iowa. “A freaking serial killer … isn’t going to confess in a novel.”
Kent’s breath caught, but this silence was shorter, a mere hesitation. “They never proved it was actually a serial killer.”
Another thing neither of them had said since coming to Iowa.
“I mean, I know … but …”
She tried a deeper breath and pulled back to try to catch his eyes and see the emotion hiding in them.
Kent shook his head a little. “Nell … if someone did go back through all the papers and find all that … they would conclude it’s a serial killer. Nobody would make that a love story.”
That was entirely the reason she’d been avoiding true crime and thrillers for years, thanks. “So it’s not him. And it’s not—I’m going to read the rest of it, and Art’s going to pay me for reading the rest of it, and it’s going to end up veering and being absolutely nothing.” She licked her lips again, forgetting. “It’s nothing. He didn’t find me.”
“Nell …”
“I mean, he didn’t anyway,” she rushed on, because no, Kent hadn’t made it that far yet on his own. “It was his agent or publisher or someone, and it’s because Art called the place Pending and has all that info on his website.” Where there weren’t any pictures of her. Because there weren’t any photos of her since coming to Iowa. None online, none on her phone, none on Kent’s … they stuck with friends who knew and respected her wishes on that without needing to have the full explanation of why, and they didn’t have people over, either, to ask why the couple who’d run away to get married didn’t have at least a single iPhone snap of the day itself.
This couldn’t unravel now. She couldn’t unravel now.
Kent pulled her in closer and slowly dropped his head to hers so he didn’t jar his cheekbone on her skull. “Fuck, honey. I’m sorry. Is there anything …?”
Usually when someone asked that, there wasn’t. They said it because they wanted to feel better about offering, but in the end there wasn’t anything for them to do but make that empty offer.
He didn’t work tomorrow. Nell did, but he didn’t. And he was a fast reader. “How long do you think it would take you to get through the whole book?”
Kent took a slow breath through his nose and held it before letting it gust out in a sigh. “Probably not by midnight, but definitely before morning.”
“Would you?”
He squeezed her tighter before letting go. “Do you want me to start now?”
What Nell really wanted was to rewind back to a time she didn’t know the damn book existed, but she nodded. The second-best thing was to get this over with, and behind them, as quickly as possible.
from Since You Went Away by C. J. O’Connell (Penguin, 2024)
Rosie is full of unspoken words. She tamps things down, and you have to be quick to catch it—the way she swallows a sentence or entombs a paragraph or gently folds a monologue like a flag to drop it into the grave. People like Hailey and Kayleigh don’t even notice and just continue yammering: about grades, about professors, about their own problems. They fail to realize that they, personally, might be making themselves into a problem.
I know Rosie just has to make it through this year. It’s her senior year, the only year K College really lets its students live off-campus and make that next step before becoming full adults, and come June she’ll be free from all of them. Kayleigh’s followed her from high school, clinging like a leech that will never have its fill. They’ll keep sucking her dry until she drops dead or shakes them free, and Rosie is too sweet to shake them free.
I keep having to remind myself that, even though she’s twenty-one to my twenty-four, I’ve been an adult longer than she has. She laughs at me for it sometimes: Cal, you’ve been on your own too long.
That’s true, but it’s nice to have the external validation. Especially from someone who so often swallows her words.
I can’t say anything about Kayleigh, because she’s known her forever and this is one of those inconveniences Rosie budgets for in her life, and I can’t say anything against Hailey—who always looks at me haughtily from half-closed eyes, like she’s applied too much smoky gray to the lids—because Rosie has nowhere else to live, but there’s another thing that’s gone on just about long enough.
Rosie takes the bus in to campus. Hailey complains about the parking situation at K, but that’s something Rosie’s even actually mentioned to me: campus is small, freshmen can’t have cars anyway, and there just aren’t many spaces. “If I drove in, I’d have to leave hours early,” she sighed, and she never sighs. A sigh would be a sign that she’s not taking everyone’s complaints and filing them away properly.
Rosie hoards her sighs. It’s a privilege to hear one.
“And it’s not the bus schedule,” she added, one leg tucked under her, the other foot swinging. Those are tall couches in the furnished apartments, and she’s not an especially tall woman.
I know it’s not the bus schedule. If they ran on time, then Rosie wouldn’t have an issue catching one and showing up with plenty of time to walk through the door before class started. It’s just that the bus that should be here at 9:40 rarely is. It runs late, and later with each stop, and Rosie either has to try to catch the bus an hour earlier—she might as well drive her car in and at least be free of the timetable entirely—or hustle in late, hoping not to attract too much attention as she heads to her seat.
Rosie doesn’t like attracting attention. That is, not loud attention. Her eyes catch mine, and she looks away as she tucks her hair behind her ear, but then she looks back to make sure she still has my attention. My quiet attention.
But she’s slow to get going in the mornings, slow to wake up, and having Hailey as a roommate means she can’t just go to bed earlier. Duke’s caught complaints from other units about her music, or her voice, or her random midnight vacuum cleaner jags. At least 12 has never been the site of loud sex. Imagine a man looking at Hailey and thinking he’d want to negotiate all of that.
She’d probably keep monologuing throughout. A litany of complaints.
Rosie doesn’t complain. She simply won’t, ever. She’ll endure the roommate, and endure the loud friend from her past, and endure the late bus, but I can do something about one of those. Tomorrow I’m going to call Metro and have a few words.
Rebecca Frost 