From the TBR Pile: Blog Tour: Excerpt #10 of When the Lights Go Out by Mary Kubica

We are so excited to be a part of a 2-part tour for the release of best selling author Mary Kubica’s new psychological thriller, When the Lights Go Out!

Follow along the excerpt tour beginning in August, with long excerpts in consecutive order at each tour stop, followed by an Instagram tour and review tour beginning in September! Links can be found below.

Author: Mary Kubica

Publisher: Park Row

Date of publication: September 4, 2018

Jessie Sloane is on the path to rebuilding her life after years of caring for her ailing mother. She rents a new apartment and applies for college. But when the college informs her that her social security number has raised a red flag, Jessie discovers a shocking detail that causes her to doubt everything she’s ever known.

Finding herself suddenly at the center of a bizarre mystery, Jessie tumbles down a rabbit hole, which is only exacerbated by grief and a relentless lack of sleep. As days pass and the insomnia worsens, it plays with Jessie’s mind. Her judgment is blurred, her thoughts are hampered by fatigue. Jessie begins to see things until she can no longer tell the difference between what’s real and what she’s only imagined.

Meanwhile, twenty years earlier and two hundred and fifty miles away, another woman’s split-second decision may hold the key to Jessie’s secret past. Has Jessie’s whole life been a lie or have her delusions gotten the best of her?

“Kubica brilliantly unravels the lives of two women in this tense and haunting tale of identity and deceit. WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT will keep you questioning everything-and everyone-until the riveting conclusion. A twisty, captivating, edge-of-your-seat read.” –Megan Miranda, New York Times bestselling author of ALL THE MISSING GIRLS

Excerpt #10:

“What do you think?” Lily asks over the noise of the hair dryer and I can’t help myself.

“I hate it,” I say, for the eighth or ninth time in a row, one for as many apartments as we’ve seen. Insomnia does that too. It keeps us honest because we don’t have the energy to manufacture a lie.

“How come?” she asks, and I tell her about the hair dryer next door. How it’s loud.

Lily keeps composed, though inside her patience with me must be wearing thin. “Then we keep looking,” she says as I follow her out the door. I’d love to believe that she wants me to be happy, that she wants me to find the perfect place to live. But ultimately it comes down to one thing: my signature on a dotted line. What a lease agreement means for Lily is that an afternoon with me isn’t a complete waste of time.

“I have one more to show you,” she says, promising something different from the last umpteen apartments we’ve seen. We return to the Kia and I buckle up in the back seat, behind the purse that’s already riding shotgun. We drive. Minutes later the car pulls to a sluggish stop before a greystone on Cornelia, gliding easily into a parking spot. The street is residential, lacking completely in communal living structures. No apartments. No condominiums. No high rises with elevators that overlook crappy convenient marts. No strangers milling around on street corners.

The house is easily a hundred years old, beautiful and yet overwhelming for its grandeur. It’s three stories tall and steep, wide steps that lead to a front porch. A bank of windows on each floor. A flat-as-a-pancake roof. Beneath the first floor there’s a garden apartment, peeking up from beneath concrete.

“This is a three flat?” I ask as we step from the car, envisioning stacks of independent units filling the home, all united by a common front door. I expect Lily to say yes.

But instead she laughs at me, saying, “No, this is a private residential home. It’s not for sale, not that you could afford it if it was. Easily a million and a half,” she says. “Dollars, that is,” and I pause beneath a tree to ask what we’re doing here. The day is warm, one of those September days that holds autumn at bay. What we want is do climb into sweaters and jeans, sip cocoa, wrap ourselves in blankets and watch the falling leaves. But instead we drip with sweat. The nights grow cold, but the days are hot, thirty degree variants from morning to night. It won’t last long. According to the weatherman, a change is coming, and it’s coming soon. But for now, I stand in shorts and a t-shirt, a sweatshirt wrapped around my waist. When the sun goes down, the temperature will too.

“This way,” Lily says with a slight nod of the head. I hurry along after her, but before we round the side of the greystone, something catches my eye. A woman walking down the sidewalk in our direction. She’s a good thirty feet away, but moving closer to us. I don’t see her face at first because of the force of the wind pushing her dark hair forward and into her eyes. But it doesn’t matter. It’s the posture that does it for me. That and the tiny feet as they shuffle along. It’s the unassuming way she holds herself upright, curved at the shoulders just so. It’s her shape, the height and width of it. The shade and texture of a periwinkle coat, a parka, mid-thigh length with a drawstring waist and a hood, though it’s much too warm for a coat with a hood.

The coat is the same one as Mom had.

I feel my heart start to beat. My mouth opens and a single word forms there on my lips. Mom. Because that’s exactly who it is. It’s her; it’s Mom. She’s here, alive, in the flesh, coming to see me. My arm lifts involuntarily and I start to wave, but with the hair in her eyes, she can’t see me standing there on the sidewalk six feet away, waving.

Mom doesn’t look at me as she passes by. She doesn’t see me. She thinks I’m someone else. I call to her, my voice catching as the word comes out, so that it doesn’t come out. Instead it gets trapped somewhere in my throat. Tears pool in my eyes and I think that I’m going to lose her, that she’s going to keep walking by. And so my hand reaches out and latches on to her arm. A knee-jerk reaction. To stop her from walking past. To prevent her from leaving.

My hand grabs a hold of her forearm, clamping down. But just as it does, the woman frees her face of the hair and casts a glance at me. And I see then what I failed to see before, that this woman is barely thirty years old, much too young to be my mother. And that her face is covered in an enormity of makeup, unlike Mom who wore her face bare.

Her coat is not periwinkle at all but darker, more like eggplant or wine. And it has no hood. As she nears, I see more clearly. It isn’t a coat after all, but a dress.

She looks nothing like Mom.

For a second I feel like I can’t breathe, the wind knocked out of me. The woman tugs her arm free. She gives me a dirty look, scooting past me as I slip from the sidewalk, my feet falling on grass.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper as she skirts eye contact, avoids my stare. She moves to the far edge of the sidewalk where she’ll be two feet away, where I can’t reach her. “I thought you were someone else,” I breathe as my eyes turn to find Lily with her arms folded, trying to pretend that this didn’t just happen.

Of course it’s not Mom, I tell myself as I watch the woman in the eggplant dress move on – faster now, no longer shuffling along but now walking at a clipped pace to get away from me.

Of course it’s not Mom, because Mom is dead.

Purchase Links

Amazon | Books-A-Million | Barnes & Noble

About Mary Kubica

Mary Kubica is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of THE GOOD GIRL and PRETTY BABY. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in History and American Literature. She lives outside of Chicago with her husband and two children and enjoys photography, gardening and caring for the animals at a local shelter.

Connect with Mary

Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram

Excerpt Tour:

Monday, August 20th: Palmer’s Page Turners

Tuesday, August 21st: Books and Cats and Coffee

Wednesday, August 22nd: Mystery Suspense Reviews

Thursday, August 23rd: Book Reviews and More by Kathy

Friday, August 24th: A Bookworm’s World

Monday, August 27th: Novel Gossip

Tuesday, August 28th: Books & Spoons

Wednesday, August 29th: Read Love Blog

Thursday, August 30th: That’s What She Read