Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz (books to read for teens txt) 📕

into shock at first, and sometimes, when the shock wears off, they remember the important details better than they did at the start.

‘You were in the park for a good ten minutes before you found her, yes? That’s a real amount of time. You might have seen something, someone, and if you did, we want to know about it. You call me straight away, okay Ruby? If there’s anything you remember better.’

The younger policeman, Officer Jennings, said Ruby did a great job calling 911 and directing the police to the body. He said she did a great job not being afraid. But Detective O’Byrne, he seemed disappointed in her, like she could have given him more.

I didn’t see anything, Detective.

And now all I see is her.

The door to the bar jangles open and a couple stumble through the doorway backwards, shaking raindrops off their shared umbrella. They’re young, laughing, and the boy kisses the girl full on the mouth before he heads to the bar. As the girl sits down on the couch next to Ruby’s, she never takes her eyes off the boy. Even in her current state, it’s easy for Ruby to see the new love shining off this girl. She’s glowing with it, warming the room.

Ruby thinks: this young woman is so clearly in love with this young man today. In the same way it is raining today and she found a dead body today, and she is drinking whiskey in the afternoon. Today. Tuesday, 15 April, four weeks after she arrived in New York City. Tomorrow, these things will only be true of yesterday. Tomorrow, it might be dry, blue-skied out there. Tomorrow, she cannot say I found a dead girl today. And tomorrow this young girl with her shining eyes, with her love-glow, may have loved a boy yesterday. She may have loved him with all the heat a body can generate, until some chance thing he said, some small action—or maybe a large one—took hold of her new love and crushed it, pierced through the cocoon she had created. It only takes a beat, a careless word, a thoughtless admission, for everything to change. So that, tomorrow, this young girl may find herself staring at the wall, wondering how everything is suddenly so different now, when at this very moment yesterday she was sharing an umbrella with a boy who kissed her in doorways, a boy who sheltered her and took such care. She will wonder at how quickly all that care can disappear.

He sits down with her today, this day, and this girl puts her leg over his thigh, easy, proprietary. They are ripe with beginnings and Ruby, already, has prescribed them an ending. What’s wrong with me, she wonders. Why does she assume she knows anything at all about this young couple’s tomorrows? Surely some people find contentment and get to hold on to it. Surely, some people find their person, and stay with that person, and make babies and a life with that person. Not just some people, in fact, but most people.

Ruby is the odd one out, here.

Looking down, trying not to cry in this dingy bar, she sees her phone screen light up. Messages from Ash, three of them in a row. The first two messages must have come through when she was walking to the bar. Opening them now, Ruby sees a series of question marks, and then, time-stamped a few minutes later, a misspelled sentence asking where she was.

His latest message, fresh in her hand, is all in caps.

JESUS RUBY WHATS GOING ON?

Her text to him when she got out of the shower:

I found a dead girl today.

Ash woke up to this.

Curled up on her couch at the back of the bar, ready for another whiskey, Ruby doesn’t know how to respond. What would she say? She was mad at him, at herself, and she went for a run, and then everything changed, and now she doesn’t know what she feels at all. Maybe if she could talk to him—but she knows she can’t call, knows he won’t answer at this time of day, even as her fingers hover over his name. Eventually, she puts her phone away. She can explain what happened some other time. It’s not like he can come to her, shelter her. In the end, it doesn’t really matter.

In the end.

In the end, you can’t get back what you’ve lost. You can’t bring back the dead. There is a girl who died today, and Ruby doesn’t even know her name. She will need to wait for the police or the papers to tell her about this yellow-haired girl in her purple T-shirt, with her orange nails, and her bloody face. This girl, she thinks, would surely have something to say about all there is to lose—in the end.

Ruby’s glass is empty. She heads back to the bar, walks past the nuzzling, love-soaked couple. Wanting, suddenly, to stop and tell them she’s so very sorry. For everything that will surely come their way.

ELEVEN

‘TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED.’

Afterwards, Ruby can barely remember what she said in her official police interview. She knows Detective O’Byrne started by asking her questions about her career, why she came to New York, how often she went running. Understands he was trying hard to make her feel comfortable, mimicking the flow of a casual conversation, but the absurdity of it, sitting and talking to a homicide detective about her graphic design work back home—‘It’s great, but it’s not, um, my passion’—and how she is currently living off money once destined for a house deposit—‘My grandmother, uh, she left me $25,000 when she died’—or explaining that she tries to run every day: the madness of sharing such small details of her life made the words scramble on the way out, rearrange on her tongue, until she found she could not make sense of anything, could no longer tell what was important, and what to leave out.

She understood Detective