Title: Someones Listening
Author: Seraphina Nova Glass
Publisher: Graydon House Books
Release Date: 28th July 2020
BLURB supplied by Harlequin Trade
You’re not alone.
Someone’s waiting. Someone’s watching…Someone's listening.
In SOMEONE’S LISTENING
Dr. Faith Finley has everything she’s ever wanted: she’s a renowned
psychologist, a radio personality—host of the wildly popular “Someone’s
Listening with Dr. Faith Finley”—and a soon-to-be bestselling author. She’s
young, beautiful, and married to the perfect man, Liam.
Of course Liam was at
Faith’s book launch with her. But after her car crashes on the way home and
she’s pulled from the wreckage, nobody can confirm that Liam was with her at
the party. The police claim she was alone in car, and they don’t believe her
when she says otherwise. Perhaps that’s understandable, given the horrible
thing Faith was accused of doing a few weeks ago.
And then the notes
start arriving—the ones literally ripped from the pages of Faith’s own
self-help book on leaving an abusive relationship. Ones like “Secure your new
home. Consider new window and door locks, an alarm system, and steel doors…”
Where is Liam? Is his
disappearance connected to the scandal that ruined Faith’s life? Who is sending
the notes? Faith’s very life will depend on finding the answers.
Goodreads Link
PURCHASE LINKS
EXCERPT
PROLOGUE
WHEN I WAKE UP,
IT’S BLACK AND STILL; I FEEL A light, icy snow that floats rather than falls,
and I can’t open my eyes. I don’t know where I am, but it’s so quiet, the
silence rings in my ears. My fingertips try to grip the ground, but I feel only
a sheet of ice beneath me, splintered with bits of embedded gravel. The air is
sharp, and I try to call for him, but I can’t speak. How long have I been here?
I drift back out of consciousness. The next time I wake, I hear the crunching
of ice under the boots of EMTs who rush around my body. I know where I am. I’m
lying in the middle of County Road 6. There has been a crash. There’s a
swirling red light, a strobe light in the vast blackness: they tell me not to
move.
“Where’s my
husband?” I whimper. They tell me to try not to talk either. “Liam!” I try to
yell for him, but it barely escapes my lips; they’re numb, near frozen, and it
comes out in a hoarse whisper. How has this happened?
I think of
the party and how I hate driving at night, and how I was careful not to drink
too much. I nursed a glass or two, stayed in control. Liam had a lot more. It
wasn’t like him to get loaded, and I knew it was his way of getting back at me.
He was irritated with me, with the position I’d put him in, even though he had
never said it in so many words. I wanted to please him because this whole
horrible situation was my fault, and I was sorry.
When I wake
up again I’m in a hospital room, connected to tubes and machines. The IV needle
is stuck into a bruised, purple vein in the back of my hand that aches. In the
dim light, I sip juice from a tiny plastic cup, and the soft beep of the EKG
tries to lull me back to sleep, but I fight it. I want answers. I need to
appear stabilized and alert. Another dose of painkiller is released into my IV;
the momentary euphoria forces me to heave a sigh. I need to keep my eyes open.
I can hear the cops arrive and talk to someone at a desk outside my door.
They’ll tell me what happened.
There’s a
nurse who calls me “sweetie” and changes the subject when I ask about the
accident. She gives the cops a sideways look when they come in to talk to me,
and tells them they only have a few minutes and that I need to rest.
Detective
John Sterling greets me with a soft “Hello, ma’am.” I almost forget about my
shattered femur and groan after I move too quickly. Another officer lingers by
the door, a tall, stern-looking woman with her light hair pulled into a tight
bun at the base of her skull. She tells me I’m lucky to be alive, and if it had
dropped below freezing, I wouldn’t have lasted those couple hours before a
passing car stopped and called 911. I ask where Liam is, but she just looks to
Sterling. Something is terribly wrong.
“Why won’t
anyone tell me what happened to him?” I plead. I watch Detective Sterling as he
picks his way through a response.
“The nurse
tells me that you believe he was in the car with you at the time of the
accident,” he says. I can hear the condescension in his voice. He’s speaking to
me like I’m a child.
“They said ‘I
believe’ he was? That’s not a— That’s a fact. We came from a party—a book
signing party. Anyone, anyone can tell you that he was with me. Please. Is he
hurt?” I look down at my body for the first time and see the jagged stitches
holding together the bruised flesh of my right arm. They look exaggerated, like
the kind you might draw on with makeup and glue for a Halloween costume. I
close my eyes, holding back nausea. I try to walk through the series of
events—trying to piece together what happened and when.
Liam had been
quiet in the car. I knew he’d believed me after the accusations started. I knew
he trusted me, but maybe I’d underestimated the seeds of doubt that had been
planted in his mind. I tried to lighten the mood when we got in the car by
making some joke about the fourteen-dollar domestic beers; he’d given a weak
chuckle and rested his head on the passenger window.
The detective
looks at me with something resembling sympathy but closer to pity.
“Do you
recall how much you had to drink last night?” he asks accusingly.
“What? You
think…? No. I drove because he… No! Where is he?” I ask, not recognizing my own
voice. It’s haggard and raw.
“Do you
recall taking anything to help you relax? Anything that might impair your
driving?”
“No,” I snap,
nearly in tears again.
“So, you
didn’t take any benzodiazepine maybe? Yesterday…at some point?”
“No— I—
Please.” I choke back tears. “I don’t…” He looks at me pointedly, then
scribbles something on his stupid notepad. I didn’t know what to say. Liam must
be dead, and they think I’m too fragile to take the news. Why would they ask me
this?
“Ma’am,” he
says, standing. He softens his tone. This is it. He’s going to tell me something
I’ll never recover from.
“You were the
only one in the car when medics got there,” he says, studying me for my
response, waiting to detect a lie that he can use against me later. His
patronizing look infuriates me.
“What?” The
blood thumps in my ears. They think I’m crazy; that soft tone isn’t a
sympathetic one reserved for delivery of the news that a loved one has
died—it’s the careful language chosen when speaking to someone unstable. They
think I’m some addict or a drunk. Maybe they think the impact had made me lose
the details, but he was there. I swear to God. His cry came too late and there
was a crash. It was deafening, and I saw him reach for me, his face distorted
in terror. He tried to shield me. He was there. He was next to me, screaming my
name when we saw the truck headlights appear only feet in front of us—too late.
Excerpted from Someone’s Listening by Seraphina
Nova Glass, Copyright © 2020 by
Seraphina Nova Glass. Published by Graydon House Books.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Seraphina Nova Glass is a professor and
Playwright-in-Residence at the University of Texas-Arlington, where she teaches
Film Studies and Playwriting. She holds an MFA in playwriting from Smith
College, and has optioned multiple screenplays to Hallmark and Lifetime. Someone's
Listening is her first novel.
AUTHOR LINKS
Twitter: @SeraphinaNova
Instagram: @SeraphinaNovaGlass
Facebook: @SeraphinaNovaGlass
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