In Her Place

by Edel Coffey

Genres: Family Life; Women's Fiction; Gothic; Thrillers; Domestic Thrillers; Medical Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

From the #1 bestselling author of Breaking Point and winner of Crime Novel of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards.

Who is the other woman? That's for you to decide.

Ann devoted years to her mother's care. Now, in a bid to escape the emptiness of her old flat and the paperwork caused by her death, Ann finds herself in a bar upstate. She has been so good for so long, she deserves a little fun.

Justin is also grieving but his wife is still alive. She has been dying for a long time and they say she doesn't have long left. He deserves a little fun, too.

Justin asks Ann to move in just a few weeks later. A million miles away from her lonely life in New York, here Ann finds a world where she is wanted and needed by both Justin and his little girl, Sophie.

But just as Ann finds that she is pregnant, Justin receives news. Unexpectedly, his wife's drug trial has been a success. Deborah is coming home.

Ann doesn't quite know what to do. The best news is the very worst news. And who is really the other woman in this situation? All she knows is that she finally likes her life and she plans to keep it.

Praise for Breaking Point:
'Raw, compelling, and ground-breaking' Liz Nugent
'A gripping, compulsive pageturner about what we expect from women, especially mothers' Marian Keyes
'Prepare to feel devastated and enraged all at once' Heat
'Thought-provoking' Sun
'A rare treat, an emotional thriller steeped in humanity' John Boyne
'Gripping, unswerving, heart-breaking' Celia Walden, author of Payday
'An incredibly powerful thriller with real emotional depth' TM Logan, author of The Holiday

Release date: March 21, 2024

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 304

Sample

The day before Ann first met Justin was a record low. It was two months since Ann’s mother had died and she still hadn’t gotten a foothold on returning to work. Her writing had dwindled to nothing during the years her mother was ill, as she slowly surrendered even the smallest journalistic assignments, her mother’s illness consuming everything. Ann spent her days reaching out to old editors whose emails bounced back, or who had since moved on or up or out of journalism altogether. She started from scratch with new editors, most of them younger than her thirty-eight years, trying to establish a connection, a relationship and ideally a paying job.

She took on every assignment in the hope that she would become known as the girl who never said no, a reliable go-to woman. She desperately needed to build some security. She was terrified most days of the daunting reality that her mother was dead and she was now alone. She had no safety net, nobody to rely on, nothing to fall back on. Previously she and her mother had lived frugally on her mother’s disability insurance, but that payment had stopped the day her mother died and now Ann was struggling.

If she didn’t have an assignment to follow up, which was not uncommon, Ann walked the streets around Williamsburg, in an attempt to escape the confines of the apartment. When she stayed in, she felt herself losing her grip on reality, as if her life was no longer real and nothing really mattered. On days like these, she felt like a flimsy figment of someone’s imagination. On days like these it was easy to believe that it made no difference if she lived or died, and she wondered if she found her way off the edge of her apartment building, would she just float up and away like a paper figure or plummet to the street below? She knew this was a dangerous mindset. All she could do in those moments was get out of the apartment until the feelings subsided.

She walked past shops filled with things that nobody needed, labelled with prices that seemed incomprehensibly prohibitive, and yet these were everyday items – a teapot, a swimsuit, a writing set. Could ordinary people actually afford these things? She felt utterly alienated and excluded from this world. She lived outside of it, viewing it as if from behind a pane of glass.

She stopped outside a shop that sold delicate jewellery, and beautiful things that she wanted to touch and smell – candles, tarot cards, paperweights. Items for young, unjaded girls with silky hair. Girls who were doing post-grads at NYU. Girls who wore rings on their knuckles and thumbs. Girls whose willowy limbs were oiled and beautiful, and smelled like jasmine but only if they allowed you to get close enough. None of it was for Ann. She felt the drabness of her life humming like a magnetic field. No matter how much effort she made with her long blonde hair or a perfectly executed eyeliner flick, she still felt her inner sadness radiating through her veneer like a lie she couldn’t hide.

She simply could not go on like this. Not in the way that people said they could not go on, but in the most literal interpretation of the concept. She could not go on. She would not go on. She stared at her fragmented reflection in the shop window, a mosaic of sadness.

If I do not get a sign today, she thought, are you listening universe? Today! – that things will get better after all this shit, I will give up.

Ann had never seriously contemplated suicide but lately when she thought about it she identified a feeling of relief, that she would no longer have to think about things, that she would be spared the worry of how to pay next month’s rent, and forget the gaping hole that was the absence of her mother and the guilt that seemed to fill it.

Her phone vibrated. She looked down and saw a request from an old editor, asking whether she was able to drive to Hudson city tonight to preview a play that was causing a local stir and was coming to the Brooklyn arts festival in the summer. 800 words. $400. She had been hoping for a more exciting sign from the universe, like winning the lottery, but she had asked for a sign and the universe had delivered, so she would have to keep her side of the bargain now.

Maybe it would do her good to get out of town for a night. A change of scene. Her writing felt wooden and she was certain it was because her life had become dull and repetitive. She had little to say and even less to write about. The sound of the heating creeping through the vents in her mother’s apartment. The endless streams of cyclists ferrying food to and from people like her, hiding from life behind apartment doors.

She typed out a brief reply on her phone; yes she would go to Hudson city tonight, see this play that had a small town up in arms, interview the writer-director, before turning around and driving back to the safety of Brooklyn.

She had to start moving on, rebuilding her life, and her finances. She had to start saying yes to work, to life. She couldn’t live in her mom’s place for ever. Her sisters were already dropping hints about selling it. She could give in or she could try. Just put one foot in front of the other, she told herself. Just get through today.

As she sent the message back to the editor, she automatically flipped from her email to social media, scrolling quickly through the posts of former friends. She had watched her peers move smoothly through the gears of their lives, finding the turbo-boost just as Ann’s mother became unwell. She had watched them advance precipitously towards successful adulthood as she dropped out of her own life to care for her mother. Some of her friends had bolstered their earning power with marriage to power players, lawyers, plastic surgeons, tech bros, people who could support their hobby careers as writers. Some even had children, which they quickly handed over to nannies so they could refocus on solidifying their earning power and success. Ann tried not to think about lost opportunities, about how that might have been her now, had she somehow had the insight to know that coupling up, allying early on, was like adding a booster pack to your life. But Ann had known nothing back then, when Richard had proposed and she had thought that part of her life could wait. Now she was a nobody who had to street-fight her way back into her career against interns and youngsters who were arriving thick and fast like CGI mercenaries to be dispensed with.

Ann had little direction now, without her mom’s twenty-four-hour care schedule to keep her busy. The hours stretched endlessly, and, with little or no money, there was nothing to do. She couldn’t go to the cinema or ask a friend for lunch or dinner, or even buy a new outfit to cheer herself up. It felt important to plot her own life on the graph of everyone else’s. She looked up all of the people she could remember from high school, college, early jobs, every single peer she could find as a comparative. In high school she had been voted most likely to be prom queen, most likely to marry, and most likely to be rich. She knew these were ridiculous metrics to base her hopes and dreams on but she had believed it too. Now, she was one of the few people from her graduating year who was single, and the only woman. The other two were men, one a foreign correspondent (everyone knew not to marry them) and a journalist who had sold his news app for forty million dollars straight out of college. Most of her former classmates also appeared to have kids in their profile pictures. Some of them had teenagers! Were they really old enough to have teenage children? It seemed like an impossibility to her. She supposed it was an impossibility for her now. At the age of 38, single, broke, she would likely never have a child, a husband, or a home of the kind that her friends all seemed to have – large enough to accommodate not only several children, but the dream of family life – sports equipment, musical instruments, favourite toys and teddy bears, pink duvets and lighting for girls’ bedrooms, a sailing theme for the boys, Christmas decorations and camping equipment stored in the basement, double-door refrigerators stuffed with food for regular family dinners. That had been her dream. More than that, it had been her assumption.

She clicked on image after image, searched profiles of husbands, partners, husbands’ families, friends, co-workers and found these people were surrounded by concentric circles of money. Rings of wealth reinforced by rings of wealth. This was the worst thing for Ann to be doing at a time when she was grieving and directionless. Compare and contrast was not a good game for right now. These social media images were not real, she told herself. Just the best parts of other people’s lives. But still, the best parts of her life had never looked this good.

She shut her phone off and shoved it into her pocket. Hunching her shoulders, she pushed her hands deeper into the pockets of her coat, a cheap knock-off from TK Maxx. She looked up the street, which was covered with yellow and orange leaves, nature’s confetti to match the Halloween decorations that hung from every doorway, the pumpkins and gourds that sat on windowsills and benches outside coffee shops. The weather had been unseasonably mild but this week it had turned and now people huddled into their sleeping-bag coats and looked down at the pavement instead of into each other’s faces.

She stepped inside the boutique for something to do, instinctively picking up a decorative glass plate, hand-painted with a watercolour of a flower, and with no apparent function. Ann was fondling the trinket appraisingly when she heard a voice say, ‘Ann? Is that you, Ann?’

She looked up to find a luminous woman looking back at her.

‘Ann, it’s Judy. Judy Kepler.’

She dropped the hand holding the plate down by her side. ‘Judy!? Oh my god, Judy you look amazing!’ Judy looked the kind of amazing that people looked only after a committed investment. This was not the impact of a week-long juice cleanse. This was a lifestyle.

Judy seemed lit from within. Ann’s hand went to her hair, which was swept up in a messy bun. She had poked a mascara wand at her eyes and swept a lipstick across her mouth but apart from that she hadn’t put make-up on. She was wearing a pair of jeans, some Birkenstocks with socks, and an old cashmere jumper with a fraying cuff. Before she had bumped into Judy, she had hoped to look just the right side of cool, blending in with the young crowd, but faced with Judy’s glowing presence and crisp white outfit, Ann knew that she just looked like what she was – beaten down, impoverished and unloved.

Judy hugged her and Ann inhaled her rich, clean scent – something Japanese, she wondered? It was so delicate and yet so … expensive. Ann tried to imagine what Judy might be smelling – top notes of unwashed hair, bed linen that hadn’t been changed in too long, base notes of failure and career slump. Judy’s skin looked like oil had been freshly rubbed into it at a beauty salon. Her cheeks were splendidly rosy.

‘Judy, I had no idea you lived around here?’

‘Well, I don’t; I’m a bit off my beaten path. We just bought a place in Dumbo but I wanted to come up because I love the jewellery in this store … do you live nearby?’

Ann allowed the Dumbo statement to sink in, keeping her expression neutral. She and Judy both knew what buying a place in Dumbo meant. That little patch of streets between the Brooklyn Bridge overpass and the Manhattan Bridge was the exclusive reserve of the super-rich. Even back when Ann was in university a one-bed could set you back as much as a million dollars. And that was before the place was gentrified and smothered by an algal bloom of wealthy Manhattanites.

‘I’m still at my mom’s old place, just up off McCarren Park, remember?’

‘Oh yes, of course I remember! How is your mom?’

Ann paused. This was always hard. Harder on the people she had to tell, she thought. ‘She … died.’ She rushed to stop Judy apologising, and they both grabbed at each other’s hands, wanting to erase the other person’s awkwardness.

‘Listen,’ Judy said, cutting through it, ‘do you have time for a coffee? There’s a gorgeous little diner a few blocks away … ’

Ann had nothing but time, and as she took in the quality of Judy’s outfit, her glowing complexion and tasteful highlights, she knew that she wouldn’t have to worry about paying. ‘Do you know, I’d really love that,’ she said. ‘It’s been so long.’

‘Great, let me just grab these and we’ll be all set.’ Judy handed a candle, some tiny dropper bottles of mysterious liquids and a couple of gossamer-thin gold rings to the assistant, who rang it up.

‘That’s five forty,’ she sang. ‘Cash or card?’

Judy paid without blinking.

In the diner, Judy shrugged off her jacket to reveal a tanned body that looked sculpted by reformer Pilates and ketosis.

‘You look amazing,’ Ann said. ‘I can’t believe we’re the same age.’

Judy laughed and batted the compliment away. Ann made a mental note to start exercising again but her inner voice noted that Judy’s appearance had as much to do with money as exercise.

‘So, how are you doing, Ann? The last few years must have been very tough on you. I’m so sorry about your mom. She was always so nice to us girls when we came over after classes.’

Ann smiled. ‘Thank you.’ She had learned the easiest way to reverse out of this conversation. Say thank you, acknowledge it was hard, but express stoicism and gratitude that you were one of the lucky ones who had your parents in adulthood. Most people moved the conversation on after that.

‘What are you doing these days? Do you keep up with any of the old crowd from Columbia?’

Ann shook her head. ‘I kind of lost touch with most people when my mom got sick. There just wasn’t time.’

‘I see Adriana in the New Yorker all the time now,’ Judy said. ‘And what about Leena’s website?! She was always clever though. That journalism MA had a lot of talent on it, including you. Ever since you won that writing prize in final year, I’ve been expecting a collection of essays, a novel perhaps … ’

Ann grimaced. She knew she had failed to meet her potential but it was easier to believe that she didn’t have that much potential to begin with. Judy had always been kind to her. They became friends when they realised they were on the same train in and out of Brooklyn. They bonded over their fandom of Joan Didion, which was what had brought Judy to the journalism MA, but Judy soon realised while she loved Joan’s writing, she was more in love with Joan than with becoming a writer herself. After graduation they had lost touch.

‘Still no book,’ Ann replied. ‘I’m just dipping my toe back into work after … What about you, Judy, are you working?’

Ann wanted to put off the moment where she would have to reveal the full extent of her own failure.

Judy actually blushed. ‘Oh god no, I haven’t worked in a long time. I gave up when Chris and I got married. I was working at New York magazine for a few years but it took me so long to research and write the articles that I figured out I was earning less than the minimum wage. It just became kind of embarrassing to be working eighty-hour weeks and constantly broke. Chris and I both agreed that if we were going to have a family, one of us should be at home with the kids, so I quit writing to stay at home. We’ve got three kids now, hence the move to Dumbo.’ She rolled her eyes and bared her teeth beneath her iridescent, plump lips. She said it as if it was all a step down – the rich husband, the kids, Dumbo. Ann wondered where Judy had lived before.

Ann realised it was her turn to speak. She had been mesmerised by the sheen of Judy’s line-free face.

‘Wow,’ she blurted, ‘congratulations. Three kids. How old are they?’

‘One, two and three – I know! – but we both wanted a few kids, and we wanted them to be close, so I sacrificed my body.’

‘Wow,’ Ann repeated dumbly, ‘that does not look like the body of woman who bore three children.’ She thought Judy’s body did not look like it had been a part of any sacrifice, except maybe a sugar one.

Judy laughed. ‘Thank you.’

‘So, where are they now, your kids?’ Ann asked.

‘Oh,’ Judy said, and her eyebrows would have jumped if they were capable of moving, ‘they’re with the childminder. She’s fantastic, like a member of the family. I love being a mom but it’s really important to be the best mother I can be, and that involves a little bit of self-care time.’

She punctuated the well-practised statement with a beaming smile.

‘Tell me about your husband. Who is this Chris? And what happened to Jeff, the finance major?’

Judy’s face darkened. ‘Don’t even mention that name. It’s actually thanks to Jeff that I met Chris. I had just turned thirty and I thought Jeff was going to propose. He was a hedge fund trader by that stage – already super wealthy – and I had invested a lot of my time in him, under the understanding that we’d get married. I thought he was going to propose at my thirtieth birthday party, but instead I caught him in a bathroom cubicle with a twenty-year-old waitress from the club. I dumped him there and then. If he wasn’t even going to set me up and marry me, how was I going to put up with him cheating?’

Ann’s mind boggled as she replayed that line over and over in her head a few times. Was Judy saying she didn’t mind him cheating but did mind him not paying her?

‘ … Anyway, he made a huge scene as he was leaving – on my birthday, can you believe it? – and I was just in tears and this beautiful, kind guy who was having some quiet drinks with his friends at the bar bought six bottles of champagne to cheer me and my friends up. We’ve been together ever since.’

‘Wow,’ Ann said for the third time. ‘What does Chris do?’

‘Oh, he’s an investor, like his dad was before him. He invested big in Apple in the eighties and so Chris just picks and chooses his projects. He loves working as an angel investor, helping social justice innovation.’

Ann stopped herself from saying ‘wow’ again and instead said, ‘That’s amazing. Obviously you’re kept busy with the kids but do you get to do anything for yourself?’

‘I don’t really have time for anything, to be honest, Ann.’ Judy looked at her watch – Cartier. ‘I’ve got a Pilates class in about thirty minutes, and then a treatment with my aesthetician, but I need to get to the bookstore before that. Do you want to walk with?’

‘Sure,’ Ann said, grabbing her purse, but Judy put her hand on Ann’s, telling her, ‘I’m getting these!’ Ann smiled and thanked her.

They walked the few blocks to McNally Jackson where Judy rapidly went through a selection of fiction, non-fiction and literary journals, until she had a stack. She returned to find Ann reading the back of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights. ‘Oh, do you want that one? Pop it on my stack.’

‘Oh no,’ Ann said, ‘I’m just browsing.’ Judy gave Ann a no-nonsense mom face and said, ‘Hand it over.’ Ann didn’t dare disobey and waited as Judy went to the desk and paid $200 for the pile of books. At this rate Judy would have clocked up a cool thousand on knick-knacks by lunchtime, Ann thought.

Outside, she pressed the book into Ann’s hand. ‘It was so amazing to catch up. We’ll do it again. Come to Dumbo next time. Follow me on Instagram and we’ll keep in touch, OK? My surname is Kraus now. I’m the one with the blue tick.’ She kissed Ann on both cheeks and Ann watched her little coiled sinews bounce down the street to her Pilates class.

What the fuck just happened? Judy was not a supermodel, even though she looked like one now. She was an ordinary girl, but through what Ann imagined was procedures and hours a day dedicated to her personal wellbeing she had become a human macaron – glossy, attractive, perfect and sweet to taste. Ann looked down at the book in her hand. Judy had bought it as if it was nothing. After Ann paid the mortgage and utilities on her mom’s apartment, she was usually left with just a few hundred dollars to live on for the rest of the month, which had to go on carefully allocated travel and food.

She imagined what it might be like to walk into a shop and buy a handful of trinkets on a whim for $500 or a stack of books that you planned on reading at some point because you didn’t have to work or clean or do anything else. How much mor. . .