The Golden Hour Read online

  Outstanding Praise for the Novels of T. Greenwood

  Where I Lost Her

  “A spellbinding tale about finding what we most want in the places we least expect. I loved everything about Where I Lost Her.”

  —Mary Kubica, bestselling author of The Good Girl and Pretty Baby

  “Greenwood crafts believable relationships with searing, heartbreaking realism. This mysterious, suspenseful exploration of the human psyche will keep readers turning pages and losing sleep.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Greenwood’s fascinating tenth novel is sure to have readers riveted, as a distraught Tess struggles to learn the truth.”

  —Library Journal

  “Where I Lost Her will not disappoint.”

  —The New York Journal of Books

  “This intoxicating blend of women’s fiction and psychological thriller is the perfect platform for Greenwood’s exquisite prose and masterful storytelling.”

  —RT Book Reviews, 4.5 Stars Top Pick

  The Forever Bridge

  “Greenwood deftly captures the complicated and subtly volatile situations of three women at three very different stages of their lives with sensitivity and a stark honesty that makes for a compelling read.”

  —Tawni O’Dell, New York Times bestselling author of Back Roads

  “T. Greenwood adds another enticing, lyrical novel to her body of work.”

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

  “I loved The Forever Bridge from its first beautiful sentence to its breathtaking final one.”

  —Ann Hood, author of The Knitting Circle and An Italian Wife

  “T. Greenwood’s latest is her best. Written with acute humanity and depth, the beauty of the novel is in its complex story and, ultimately, its heartbreaking and redemptive end.”

  —Michelle Gable, author of A Paris Apartment

  “Full of palpable emotion: both the pain of unbearable losses, and the indomitable human connections that somehow allow us to bear them. This lyrical and poignant novel will appeal to fans of Caroline Leavitt’s Pictures of You and Jonathan Evison’s The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving.”

  —Gina Frangello, author of A Life in Men

  Bodies of Water

  “A complex and compelling portrait of the painful intricacies of love and loyalty. Book clubs will find much to discuss in T. Greenwood’s insightful story.”

  —Eleanor Brown, New York Times bestselling author of The Weird Sisters

  “A wrenching look at what happens when two people fall in love in the wrong place at the wrong time . . . Beauty and tragedy at the same time, darkness then light—those are Greenwood hallmarks.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Bodies of Water is no ordinary love story, but a book of astonishing precision, lyrically told, raw in its honesty and gentle in its unfolding. A luminous, fearless, heart-wrenching story about the power of true love.”

  —Ilie Ruby, author of The Salt God’s Daughter

  “This compassionate, insightful look at hope and redemption is a richly textured portrait. This gem of a story is a good choice for those who enjoy family novels.”

  —Library Journal

  “By turns beautiful and tragic, haunting and healing, I was captivated from the very first line. And Greenwood’s moving story of love and loss, hope and redemption has stayed with me, long after I turned the last page.”

  —Jillian Cantor, author of Margot

  Breathing Water

  “A poignant, clear-eyed first novel . . . filled with careful poetic description . . . the story is woven skillfully.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A poignant debut . . . Greenwood sensitively and painstakingly unravels her protagonist’s self-loathing and replaces it with a graceful dignity.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A vivid, somberly engaging first book.”

  —Larry McMurtry

  “An impressive first novel.”

  —Booklist

  “Breathing Water is startling and fresh . . . Greenwood’s novel is ripe with originality.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  Grace

  “Grace is a poetic, compelling story that glows in its subtle, yet searing examination of how we attempt to fill the potentially devastating fissures in our lives.”

  —Amy Hatvany, author of Best Kept Secret

  “This novel will keep readers rapt until the very end . . . Shocking and honest, you’re likely to never forget this book.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “Grace amazes. Ultimately so realistically human in its terror and beauty that it may haunt you for days after you finish it.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Exceptionally well-observed. Readers who enjoy insightful and sensitive family drama (Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin; Rosellen Brown’s Before and After) will appreciate discovering Greenwood.”

  —Library Journal

  Nearer Than the Sky

  “Greenwood is an assured guide through this strange territory; she has a lush, evocative style.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “T. Greenwood writes with grace and compassion about loyalty and betrayal, love and redemption in this totally absorbing novel about daughters and mothers.”

  —Ursula Hegi, author of Stones from the River

  “A lyrical investigation into the unreliability and elusiveness of memory centers Greenwood’s novel . . . The kaleidoscopic heart of the story is rich with evocative details about its heroine’s inner life.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A complicated story of love and abuse told with a directness and intensity that packs a lightning charge.”

  —Booklist

  “A remarkable portrait of resilience. With clarity and painful precision, T. Greenwood probes the dark history of Indie’s family.”

  —Rene Steinke, author of The Fires and Holy Skirts

  “Deft handling of a difficult and painful subject . . . compelling.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Potent . . . Greenwood’s clear-eyed prose takes the stuff of tabloid television and lends it humanity.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  This Glittering World

  “T. Greenwood demonstrates once again that she is a poet and storyteller of unique gifts, not the least of which is a wise and compassionate heart.”

  —Drusilla Campbell, author of The Good Sister and Blood Orange

  “Swift, stark, calamitous. Her characters confront those difficult moments that will define them, and Greenwood paints these troubled lives with attention, compassion and hope.”

  —Jerry Gabriel, author of Drowned Boy and winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction

  “Stark, taut, and superbly written. This haunting look at a fractured family is certain to please readers of literary suspense.”

  —Library Journal (starred)

  Undressing the Moon

  “This beautiful story, eloquently told, demands attention.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “A lyrical, delicately affecting tale.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Rarely has a writer rendered such highly charged topics . . . to so wrenching, yet so beautifully understated, an effect . . . T. Greenwood takes on risky subject matter, handling her volatile topics with admirable restraint . . . Undressing the Moon beautifully elucidates the human capacity to maintain grace under unrelenting fire.”

  —The Los Angeles Times

  The Hungry Season

  “This compelling study of a family in need of rescue is very effective, owing t
o Greenwood’s eloquent, exquisite word artistry and her knack for developing subtle, suspenseful scenes . . . Real, complex, and anything but formulaic.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “A deeply psychological read.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A wonderful story, engaging from the beginning that gets better with every chapter.”

  —The Washington Times

  Two Rivers

  “Ripe with surprising twists and heart-breakingly real characters, Two Rivers is a remarkable and complex look at race and forgiveness in small-town America.”

  —Michelle Richmond, New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Fog and No One You Know

  “This novel is a sensitive and suspenseful portrayal of family and the ties that bind.”

  —Lee Martin, author of The Bright Forever and River of Heaven

  “Greenwood is a writer of subtle strength, evoking small-town life beautifully while spreading out the map of Harper’s life, finding light in the darkest of stories.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “T. Greenwood’s writing shimmers and sings as she braids together past, present, and the events of one desperate day. I ached for Harper in all of his longing, guilt, grief, and vast, abiding love, and I rejoiced at his final, hard-won shot at redemption.”

  —Marisa de los Santos, New York Times bestselling author of Belong to Me and Love Walked In

  “Two Rivers is a stark, haunting story of redemption and salvation. A memorable, powerful work.”

  —Garth Stein, New York Times bestselling author of The Art of Racing in the Rain

  “A complex tale of guilt, remorse, revenge, and forgiveness . . . Convincing . . . Interesting . . .”

  —Library Journal

  “In the tradition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, T. Greenwood’s Two Rivers is a wonderfully distinctive American novel, abounding with memorable characters, unusual lore and history, dark family secrets, and love of life. Two Rivers is the story that people want to read: the one they have never read before.”

  —Howard Frank Mosher, author of Walking to Gatlinburg

  “Two Rivers is a dark and lovely elegy, filled with heartbreak that turns itself into hope and forgiveness. I felt so moved by this luminous novel.”

  —Luanne Rice, New York Times bestselling author

  “Two Rivers is reminiscent of Thornton Wilder, with its quiet New England town shadowed by tragedy, and of Sherwood Anderson, with its sense of desperate loneliness and regret . . .”

  —Bookpage

  Books by T. Greenwood

  The Golden Hour

  Where I Lost Her

  The Forever Bridge

  Bodies of Water

  Grace

  This Glittering World

  The Hungry Season

  Two Rivers

  Undressing the Moon

  Nearer Than the Sky

  Breathing Water

  The Golden Hour

  T. GREENWOOD

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Outstanding Praise for the Novels of T. Greenwood

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgments

  Palette

  The Golden Hour

  Grey Gardens

  Playing House

  Inquiry

  Haven

  Beautiful Disaster

  The Box

  The Birches

  Night Pictures

  Mermaid Tears

  Inquiry

  Bluffs Island

  Upset Down

  Bone Black

  Vigil

  Giving Thanks

  Inquiry

  In Remembrance

  Inquiry

  Snow Family

  December

  Art Brut

  Christmas

  Inquiry

  Protest

  The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

  Inquiry

  Depression Glass

  Self-Portrait

  Inquiry

  Auld Lang Syne

  Beautiful Fools

  Hide-and-Go-Seek

  Questioning

  The Vanishing Point

  Innocence

  Inquiry

  Into the Woods

  Exam

  Broken

  Falling

  The Magic Hour

  Epitaphs

  The Bluffs

  Ash and Ember

  Unspun

  Testimony

  Prophecies

  A READING GROUP GUIDE

  Discussion Questions

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  WHERE I LOST HER

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

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2017 by T. Greenwood

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  eISBN-13: 978-0-7582-9058-8

  eISBN-10: 0-7582-9058-6

  First Kensington Electronic Edition: March 2017

  ISBN: 978-0-7582-9057-1

  Acknowledgments

  Sometimes writing is a struggle. This was one of those times. With gratitude to those who gave me the necessary fortitude: Amy Hatvany, Jillian Cantor, Henry Dunow, and Peter Senftleben.

  Thanks as well to Neal Griffin and to Amy Morrissette McGarry for their invaluable advice and professional expertise.

  For Sally Mann, Diane Arbus, Susan Meiselas, Vivian Maier, and in memory of Mary Ellen Mark, in appreciation for their painfully beautiful and true work, which continually informs my own.

  For their endless patience, love, and comic relief, thanks to Patrick and the girls.

  And lastly, I am grateful to my Grampa Craig, whose magical Epitaphs and Prophecies box inspired this story.

  Palette

  If this day were a painting, if I were asked to fill my palette with all the colors of that afternoon, you might be surprised by the ones I’d choose: grasshopper greens and cerulean blue. It was June, I might argue, the last day of school. Of course, the grass was green, the sky blue.

  But what color is thirteen? Is it the cinder brown of wide eyes, the crimson flush of hot cheeks? Maybe a dollop of peach for the chipped nail polish on ragged fingernails, that same fleshy pink for thin legs as they run across that endless green. A cadmium shirt, and the washed-out cobalt of denim cutoff jeans. Add blue to black for the hair, tied back, a horse’s tail swooshing side to side like a pendulum with each stride.

  If this day were a painting, there would be trees at the edges of the canvas: the familiar woods that bordered the impossible green of the school’s lower playing fields. White and gray for the birches, with their bleached and ragged bark, but also the viridian of fir and pine. An infusion of white for the spot of sunlight illuminating the path, the shortcut home. A foyer of leaves and sunshine.

  But what is the color of breathlessness, of a sudden quickening of the pulse? What color could I coax from the palette to illustrate the pounding of feet, the crush of brush? What color would the shadows be? And what color, what shade, could I select for this moment when I stopped, breathless, heart thrumming, and almost turned back instead of taking that shortcut through the green? What color is hesitation? What color fear? The blue is easy, but what about the moment when I stepped into those woods and lost the sky?

 
I am haunted by the birches. By what lives beyond the edges of the canvas. By those things for which there are no colors to paint.

  The Golden Hour