The Becoming of Noah Shaw (The Shaw Confessions Book 1)

PAVED ROAD TURNS TO GRAVEL turns to dirt path as my mind runs on seeing her again. We’ve barely had a moment alone since arriving in England—my grandmother fought the idea of her presence at the funeral, and Ruth tried to broker a deal: England yes, funeral no, but I held fast. I miss nothing about my father—he tortured people I care about, and Mara most of all. It felt right for her to bury him with me. To be rid of him together.

It’s been less than a year since Mara first asked about my family; I’ve become closer to her than I’ve ever been to any of them, but here, today, now, I can’t help but wonder if she’s ever regretted it. Of course our meeting had been engineered, though we didn’t know it then, and probably couldn’t have done much differently if we had, but if she could go back . . . would she have wanted to know me if she’d known where I would lead her? What I would lead her into?

The first time she asked about him, we were on our way from my house to our first date, and, unsurprisingly, he wasn’t home. Only my stepmother was.

“So where was Daddy Warbucks this morning?”

“Don’t know, don’t care.” Mara looked a bit surprised at that, and I remember being rather surprised at myself—I’m usually not so obvious. “We’re not close,” I finished, hoping to end that particular line of questioning.

“Clearly,” she said. Her eyes were on me, and she said nothing else—she waited expectantly for me to keep going. I hid behind sunglasses instead.

“Why doesn’t your mother have a British accent?”

“She doesn’t have an English accent because she’s American.”

“Oh my God, really?” I’d known the girl for half a second, and she loved giving me shit from the very first.

“She’s from Massachusetts,” I said. “And she’s not actually my biological mother.” Mara knew nothing about me, and all I knew about her was that she’d been the only survivor of some calamity that claimed three lives—and that I heard her voice in my mind the night that it happened, despite her being thousands of miles away. The second I saw her, I needed to know her. Which, I suppose, meant letting her know me.

“My mother died when I was five and Katie was almost four,” I said neutrally. I probably added some version of the standard It was a long time ago, I don’t really remember her line. I waited for her to offer the expected platitude, but she didn’t. So I decided to tell her the truth—some of it.

“Ruth spent high school in England, so that’s how she met my mother, and they stayed friends at Cambridge.” I searched for my pack of cigarettes almost reflexively, placing one between my lips as I told Mara about my parents’ and stepmother’s brief flirtation with civil disobedience. I still smoked in front of Mara then—I’d started at eleven and realised I could exhale through my nose like a dragon. Seemed like a good enough reason at the time.

I went on with carefully worded backstory for a bit, and when I finally risked a glance at Mara, she was curious. There was even a slight upturn at the corners of her mouth. I remember wanting to shock her, so I told her my mother was stabbed to death, thinking that would do it.

A thing I loved about Mara immediately, though—she looked back at me completely without pity.

“At a protest,” I added. Her brows drew together, but the wide-eyed look of horror mixed with Poor baby! I’d expected to see was nowhere to be found.

So I kept going. “She made my father stay home to watch Katie that day, but I was with her. I’d just turned five a few days before, but I don’t remember it. Or much of her at all, really. My father won’t even mention her name, and he loses it if anyone else does.”

“Ruth came back to England when she heard about my mother. She’d said at one point, when I was older, that after my mother died, my father was useless. Couldn’t take care of us, couldn’t take care of himself. Literally, a disaster. So she stayed, and they got married, even though he doesn’t deserve her, even though he’d become someone else. And here we are now, one big happy family.”

That was what I remember telling Mara that day—more than I’d told anyone, certainly, but not quite the truth.

The truth is that I do remember when my mother died.

I remember her funeral: the air heavy with flowers, my grandmother’s perfume, and the picture they’d had of her in the chapel, wearing a cream-and-black-striped jumper, her blond hair pulled back in a messy ponytail at the base of her neck. The sleeves covered her hands, and she had her chin resting in one of them, her eyes crinkled at the corners, and she half smiled, quite deviously, at the camera. “You have her smile,” people said, and I remember looking into the casket at her face, wondering if that meant I’d taken it from her, and the wave of guilt that descended on me then.

Her eyes were closed, her skin waxy, her body fitted poorly into a dress I never remembered her wearing. My father had sat solemnly beside me, spine ramrod straight, his typically clean-shaven face now shadowed with days of stubble. Ruth wept openly as she stood beside the priest and spoke about Mum. I could hardly hear words through her sniffles and sobs.

My father, on the other hand—his face was nothing. He held Katie on his lap, and she was uncharacteristically quiet, her blue eyes looking bluer in her pale face, which looked paler in her little black frock and Mary Janes. Ruth wept until she couldn’t speak, and the priest, looking stricken at the open display of emotion, helped her down to her seat. She sat down beside me and took me in her arms, but I shook myself free. The room was filled with candles, tall ones, taller than I was, some of them, and I watched the wax drip onto the petal of a flower and wondered how much longer I’d be sitting there in that room with the thing that was and was not my mother.

I remember the moment she became that thing.

I remember the little gasp she made as someone pushed past her, and her head bowing forward before her hand loosened around mine.

I remember the red flowering her shirt under her jacket.

What I don’t remember is the face of the one who stabbed her. I don’t remember screaming for her or crying. And as I watched her dying, I don’t remember a look of surprise on her face or fear in her eyes, or seeing any sadness in her at all.

I remember seeing relief there, instead.