The Forgotten Hours Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE FORGOTTEN HOURS

  “A deeply moving story about friendship and love, yearning and passion, memory and loss. The Forgotten Hours is a brilliant debut from a writer of uncommon grace.”

  —William Landay, New York Times bestselling author of Defending Jacob

  “As fictional characters go, Katie Gregory seems not so much imagined as compelled into being by the unique forces of the times—the perfect envoy to accompany you into the red-hot cauldron of accused and accuser. That Katie is neither of these but bound by love to both makes her conflict more gut wrenching and the possibilities more terrifying. Add to this Schumann’s gift for knowing—and conjuring—her character’s heart, and you have a story that makes you feel it’s your heart at risk, your life on the line. You may lose track of these hours, but you won’t forget them.”

  —Tim Johnston, New York Times bestselling author of Descent

  “The Forgotten Hours poses a super-timely question: In a #MeToo situation, who would you side with, your accused family member or your best friend, the accuser? A relevant, compelling, and compassionate look at the torture of conflicted loyalties and the slipperiness of truth.”

  —Jenna Blum, New York Times bestselling author of Those Who Save Us and The Lost Family

  “With an elegance of style surprising in a first novel, Schumann shows how, when we seek truth about the past, the most treacherous secrets are those we keep from ourselves.”

  —Carol Anshaw, New York Times bestselling author of Carry the One

  “The Forgotten Hours is a wise reminder that ‘coming of age’ stories aren’t only for the very young. Katie Gregory’s need to confront her own youthful beliefs and desires is something familiar—and compelling—to us all. There is so much insight in these pages, so much compassion, all woven into a mystery I couldn’t put down.”

  —Robin Black, author of Life Drawing and If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

  “The Forgotten Hours asks important questions about memory, adolescent understanding, the age of consent, and what men have gotten away with since time immemorial. Katrin Schumann has crafted a powerful tale for the #MeToo era which should resonate far beyond this cultural moment.”

  —Miranda Beverly-Whittemore, New York Times bestselling author of Bittersweet and June

  “The Forgotten Hours is a stunning novel about trauma and shame, loyalty, and truth. Ten years after an alleged crime destroyed her family, Katie Gregory returns to an abandoned cabin she prefers to forget. As memories of her last evening there bring conflicting emotions, she struggles to rediscover her ability to trust and her faith in love. Was her father guilty of the assault for which he was convicted? What part did she play in events of that night, and can she move beyond her own guilt? Trying to unravel the answers before the heart-pounding finish will keep readers up way past bedtime. A must-read for book clubs.”

  —Barbara Claypole White, bestselling author of The Perfect Son and The Promise between Us

  “For me, the best indicator of a good book is when you’re thinking about the characters even when you aren’t reading and wondering what’s going to happen to them. This was definitely the case with The Forgotten Hours. I thoroughly enjoyed this well-written, compelling story.”

  —Marybeth Mayhew Whalen, bestselling author of When We Were Worthy and cofounder of She Reads

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Katrin Schumann

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542040037 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542040035 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781503904170 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1503904172 (paperback)

  Cover design by David Drummond

  First edition

  To Kevin,

  my love

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  PART TWO

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  PART THREE

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Q&A WITH KATRIN SCHUMANN, THE FORGOTTEN HOURS

  BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  For the want of a nail the shoe was lost,

  For the want of a shoe the horse was lost,

  For the want of a horse the rider was lost,

  For the want of a rider the battle was lost,

  For the want of a battle the kingdom was lost,

  And all for the want of a horseshoe-nail.

  —Benjamin Franklin

  PROLOGUE

  June 2007

  Two girls—almost young women, but not quite—stand side by side on a dock in the shade of an old green boathouse. Their arms and legs prickle with goose bumps. Their skin is winter pale. One has a spray of purpling bruises on her thigh, and the other has forgotten to shave. They are laughing and laughing, their toes curled over the edge of the dock, splintered after months of snow cover. Below them the lake is chilly, not very inviting. The girls are eager to launch into their summer rituals, but neither has the courage to plunge in first.

  The taller one, Lulu, is fifteen years old (or so she says). Over the past year, since Katie last saw her, she has grown two inches and let her black hair grow out so that it shifts in the wind, alive. There are hints of blue in it. Her body is soft and curvy; she has gained weight since last summer, and it suits her. When she’s older, standing in dressing rooms blasted by fluorescent lights, she will curse her flaring hips, think they’re ugly. And yet even now, men and boys—girls too—find their eyes drawn to her.

  A man comes toward them, whooping loudly, and dares them to jump into the lake. His laugh bounces over the water, off the pines on the opposite bank, and then back at them. He’s wearing faded pink-and-green swimming trunks, musty from being crammed in a drawer. Lulu is almost as tall as he is, and her hair touches his shoulder as he stands next to her, eyeing the spring-fed water. He is stocky and muscular, the hairs on his broad chest darker than the closely cropped hair on his head.

  “My beautiful girls,” he says, though only one of them is his child. “Too cold for you?”

  The other girl is his daughter, Katie—the slight one with the lank, midlength blonde hair. She feels as though she might burst when her father smiles at her. His approval is oxygen to her. It is always this way. Everyone wants t
o please him, make him laugh. She’d like to jump in to show him how tough she is, but she can’t.

  Her father’s shoulders are hunched against the early summer breeze. He shoots them both a wide smile, the slight gap between his front teeth like an exclamation point on his good humor. Each summer, John Gregory’s the first to swim out to the buoy and back. He’s the one who braves the teeming ShopRite in Blackbrooke to stock up on all the best junk food, with some veggies and oatmeal thrown in for good measure. Early mornings, he’ll take the kids bird watching, and late at night he’ll make hot chocolate after they’ve been playing Marco Polo in the lake beneath the stars, cords of hair sending icy water dripping down their backs.

  Now the sun, slowly gathering force, emerges from behind a cloud, and abruptly a thick ray lands on their cool skin. John yowls playfully, like an animal. He grabs Lulu’s hand and propels himself into the water.

  She lets out a scream. A second later, Lulu shoots up from the sparkle of the lake, sputtering. John races away from her toward the Big Float, leaving behind a trail of blocky whitecaps that peter out as they near the shore.

  Katie watches the two of them. The wind whips her hair into her eyes. Seeing her friend in the flesh again always makes her a little shy. They said goodbye not far from this very spot last September, and now it is June again, an endless cycle. Each year Lulu comes to visit Eagle Lake, and each year they silently catalog the infinitesimal changes that have taken place since they last saw each other. This year the changes in Lulu are more dramatic: longer legs, a rounder face—and her lips are fuller, her dark eyes more angled than before. A new tone to her voice betrays a hint of skepticism, a secret not yet shared.

  Though she doesn’t show it, Katie is self-conscious in the red string bikini she’s had forever. Her body has changed, too, in ways she doesn’t like. Heavier breasts, stronger muscles. That slight curve of her belly. She feels old and young at the same time. To her, the world is uncertain and wide open, full of unknown possibility. There is noise around her, and silence too—the silence of the woods, which to her seems almost loud as it hums inside her. Happiness laced with agitation, impatience. Contradictions everywhere.

  Lulu is racing after John, though she has no hope in hell of catching him. He has swum into the darkness under the Big Float, which bobs high on eight empty oil barrels. All you can see from the shoreline are the shadows slung underneath the barrels, illuminated briefly by slivers of light, then plunged into darkness again as John tips the float back and forth. It is a dare: Will Lulu swim under there to catch him? When the girls were little, they were too afraid to swim underneath the float with its ropy, glistening spiderwebs hovering just above the shadowed water.

  Katie sits on the grass by the pile of clothes they tossed to one side. She tilts her head back and looks up at the sky, inhaling the smell of ferns and mud and a lingering hint of her father’s body odor. Above her, the clouds vanish, and the sky is a flawless blue, full of promise. This summer will be different; she can feel it in her bones.

  PART ONE

  1

  June 2016

  Katie had hated the sound of a ringing telephone ever since she was a teenager. Relentless, jarring—the way it broke into the moment, insisting that whatever the caller had in mind was more important than whatever you were doing. Today, when the phone jolted her awake, it wasn’t even eight o’clock yet. A Saturday morning.

  The sheets were warm, imbued still with the loamy smell of sex, and Katie smiled to herself, thinking of Zev. He’d been waiting for her at the apartment when she got home from work last night. Before she’d even shrugged off her suit jacket, he’d pulled her limp dress shirt out from the band of her skirt, placed his hands on the skin of her waist, and lifted her off her feet, carrying her to the bed (really just a queen mattress lying on the floor). She’d liked the way his gesture felt empowering yet also assertive—she gave in to it all. They’d tripped around, laughing, struggling to shed their clothes before falling to the floor, entwined. It was heady, this feeling of not being in control. The awkward fact that he had let himself in without asking—no text, nothing—was overshadowed by her pleasure at seeing him. The graying brown hair, the deep creases etched into his face, the thin T-shirt, worn out and yet somehow elegant. He was older, different from the boys she’d been with in college and the men here in the city.

  Zev had left hours ago. He was mounting a show at a new gallery in the Village and had gone to meet the van carting two dozen carefully chosen sculptures and paintings from his studio up at Vassar. She turned her head into the pillow and grinned, remembering. Remembering. God!

  Then another buzzy ring, but it must have been the wrong number—there was a click on the other end when Katie picked up, and she tossed the receiver aside. The warmth of the sheets was so lovely on her skin that it was hard to accept she was fully awake now and there was no point in trying to go back to sleep. She cast off the coverlet. The window over Hester Street was wide open. In the two and a half years she’d been in New York, she’d become immune to the howling sirens, drivers cursing at each other in Farsi and French, and mothers screaming in panic for their unruly kids, all before the sun even rose. The air had a spring chill to it, and she grabbed a tattered silk robe and headed for the kitchen. She was ravenous.

  The apartment was in a renovated sewing factory on the Lower East Side, with crumbling redbrick walls and soaring ceilings. Insidious winds forced their way in through the window cracks during winter, ice creeping over the panes like a crystalline fungus. Her roommate, Ana, had moved out a year earlier to get married, and the silence still seemed fresh, the space no longer cluttered with her cast-off shoes and errant bobby pins. Above a frayed velvet couch hung an oil painting of a boxer in the ring, the canvas taped in the middle where Katie had snagged it on the edge of a dumpster as she’d hauled it out. On the wall near the kitchen was another oil painting, one of Zev’s: an enormous, unidentifiable flower, colored shades of red and purple so deep it was almost violent. He’d told her it reminded him of her, whatever that meant.

  In the fridge: some yogurt, skim milk, cheese bourekas Zev had brought over yesterday. At the sight of the food, her stomach tightened. Maybe coffee instead. Her cell phone, left in haste on the butcher-block countertop last night, showed two emails from the office (her boss was a total workaholic) and a text from Zev with a picture of the van in the gray morning light. The time stamp read 5:54 a.m.; he was an artist, but he sure wasn’t a slacker.

  When the apartment phone rang again, Katie hesitated, annoyed. She could count on one hand the number of times anyone had called her on the landline since she’d moved in—that is, anyone except her father. He was the only reason she even had a landline anymore.

  “Hello,” she said, reaching up to grab the coffee filters with one hand, tucking the receiver between cheek and shoulder.

  “Katherine Gregory?”

  Absolutely no one called her Katherine, and more importantly, she hadn’t used the name Gregory for six years. No one had connected the dots between who she’d been before the trial and who she was after, when she’d adopted her grandfather’s surname. “Who is this?” Katie asked.

  “It’s Marjorie O’Hannon, from the Boston Globe. You’re John Gregory’s daughter, is that right?”

  Instantly, Katie clicked the off button. The coffee filter fluttered to the floor and tumbled around in the draft at her ankles. An image of her father came to her: his broad, cheerful face when she’d visited him a few weeks ago. His release date from Wallkill had finally been confirmed for June 23. He was ecstatic—he wasn’t worried about a single thing. He had spent almost six years in prison, and now the nightmare was over, finally, truly over. He was dying to fire up a grill again, to stress over whether to buy skim or 2 percent milk, use teriyaki or steak sauce. He longed to play Angry Birds and try out Spotify. He knew so much about what was happening in the outside world without being able to participate, and now, soon, he’d be starting over. Neither of th
em mentioned, of course, that he would probably never be able to work in finance again, could never set foot in a school or live anywhere near where kids congregated.

  The phone in her hand rang once more.

  “What do you want?” Katie asked.

  “Please, Ms. Gregory—listen,” the woman said, her tone softer now, more conciliatory. “I want to hear his side of the story, your—”

  “Who the hell are you, anyway?” Katie interrupted.

  “I’m with the Spotlight team.” There was a brief pause as the woman let the implications of this sink in.

  “Just leave us alone, okay?” Reflexively, Katie turned to glance around the loft, thankful Zev was already gone. “Stop calling—”

  “Your father has a right to tell his story, doesn’t he? And we want to be fair—we want to understand your perspective, in particular regarding his long sentence.”

  Katie snorted. “And you’re on my father’s side? Right.”

  “No, that’s what I’m telling you. We don’t take—”

  “And anyway, it’s not a national story,” Katie said. “The jurors deliberated for five days. There was nothing clear cut about his case. There was zero evidence.”

  “That’s my point, Katherine.”

  The fake chumminess. The use of the wrong name. Panic began beating its ragged wings. “Why are you dredging this up, then?”

  “Listen, we’d like to hear your thoughts. We’ve already spoken to your friend Lulu Henderson.”

  Her friend Lulu. Lulu had turned out not to be who Katie had thought she was. The nauseous sensation in Katie’s stomach jumped to her throat.

  “You’re going to be getting other calls,” the reporter continued. “Everyone’s interested in these guidelines—the new sentencing guidelines. Whether public perception is influencing judges. We’d like you to tell Spotlight your story.”

  “I can’t help you. And don’t call me again,” Katie said, hanging up.

  She yanked out the phone plug. Outside, rain began to fall. She covered her face with her hands and started breathing in and out slowly. Time seemed to collapse in on itself. She was slipping into an adjacent world in which her memories of that summer were suffocatingly close, colors and shadows and smells emerging into spectacular focus—all the things she had been trying to forget.