Maybe I drank a lot last night. Or maybe I had a mini stroke or something.
The only thing she knew for sure was that her first name was Celia.
She stood up again and walked into the dining room. At one side of the room there was a large cabinet with glass doors on top and drawers on the bottom. The cabinet matched the dining set, and she crinkled her nose at it.
I hate that matchy‑matchy thing. I bet all the dishes are in a matching pattern, too.
When she opened the glass doors, she confirmed that her prediction was accurate. All the tableware and serving plates were in a matching pattern, a kind of country floral that made her think of wedding registries.
On the wall opposite the cabinet there was a large, posed photograph of three people. The background was soft gray, like they’d been in a photo studio. There was Celia, sitting next to the tall dark-haired man. They both wore white-cabled fisherman-style sweaters. The lunch-demanding little girl stood in front of them, positioned so that she was halfway between them. She, too, wore a cabled sweater, this one in pink. All three of them had the slightly glazed eyes and overly toothy smiles that came with posed photography.
This is my family? Celia thought, then told herself, more firmly,
This is my family.
There was obviously something wrong with her today. Amnesia seemed unlikely. Early-onset dementia?
It can’t be dementia. I’m only thirty‑four.
“Ah!” she said, and clapped her hands together. She’d remembered something else. She was thirty-four.
Okay, okay, you just need to walk around for a bit and then you’ll remember everything. Maybe you just didn’t sleep well or something.
She paced slowly through the dining room and into the living room. Leather furniture – more yuck – a huge entertainment system, several more photographs of herself and her family caught in various activities: eating drippy ice cream cones, building sand- castles, taking a picture with a certain mouse at an amusement park. Regular family things.
There was something about the pictures that bothered her, but she looked at them for a few minutes and couldn’t put her finger on it, so she moved on.
She climbed the stairs and found four rooms upstairs—two bedrooms, one office and a bathroom. The little girl’s bedroom had posters of Korean pop stars and a pile of soccer gear in the corner. The carpet was pink and so were the walls. It wasn’t to Celia’s taste, but then it wasn’t her room, so it didn’t matter.
The second bedroom wasn’t to her taste, either, but apparently this was her bedroom.
The bedroom I share with that strange man, she thought, with a trickle of unease.
Like the furniture downstairs, everything in the bedroom was made of heavy, dark wood, with a thick blue carpet underfoot. She didn’t like wall-to-wall carpeting, and yet it was everywhere in this house. On an end table on one side of the bed there was a wedding photograph of a younger Celia smiling next to the strange man. Beside the photograph was a brown leather purse.
Brand name, high‑end. I wouldn’t have bought this for myself. It’s a waste of money. The Audi guy must have bought it. He seems like the type to care about stuff like this.
Celia sat on the edge of the bed and emptied the purse onto the dark blue comforter. A large wallet fell out, along with a pack of Trident spearmint gum, a package of tissues, a bottle of hand sanitizer, a powder compact, a hairbrush, a cherry-flavored Chap- Stick and some business cards.
Standard purse contents, but like the photos she’d seen down- stairs, something seemed to be missing. She just couldn’t think of what that something might be.
She opened the wallet and found a New York State driver’s license with her photo on it. The name listed was “Celia Zinone.” She said the name to herself. It seemed right, unlike everything else she’d experienced so far. There was a debit card and two credit cards in the same name, and a few more family photos – mostly the posed kind—in the photo flap. All the photos were of her immediate family. Did she have no parents? No brothers or sisters or nieces or nephews?
Celia picked up the stack of business cards. They advertised Zinone’s Italian Family Restaurant next to a cartoon of a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. Her own name was listed underneath as the owner, and beneath that was the address and phone number.
I run a restaurant. Okay.
She again had a flash of memory – of stirring a giant pot of sauce, of folding ingredients into layers of lasagna.
“He said he would see me at the restaurant at lunch,” Celia said. She looked at the business card again. So she should probably get dressed and take herself to this restaurant. Maybe going to work would help her remember more.
Terror clutched at her for a moment. It was as though she stood beside a dizzying abyss, with no real sense of self, no memories, no knowledge of what she’d done the previous day or even that morning before the little girl started shouting about her lunch.
Black spots danced in front of her eyes and her heart seemed like it was trying to escape her chest. Her breath came in hard pants and she heard the wheezy quality of it, an inability to get the oxygen all the way to the bottom of her lungs.
She dug her fingers into the comforter on either side of her legs, feeling the material scrunch beneath her hands.
Calm, calm, calm. Breathe, breathe, breathe. You’re okay. You’re not in danger.
Hard on the heels of that thought came another one. Why would I be in danger?
Celia forced herself to take deep, calming breaths, and after a few moments, her heart rate slowed, though its beating still seemed unnaturally loud to her.
I just need to go to the restaurant and then things will click into place.
But how will I get there? I’m not sure where I am in relation to it.
She glanced over the items on the bed and realized what was missing. A cell phone. Surely she had one. Where had she left it, though?
She checked all the surfaces in the bedroom and found two charging stations on top of the dresser. Assuming the strange man (your husband) didn’t carry two cell phones, then one of the chargers was for her phone.
Why wasn’t it in her purse? She always kept her phone in her purse when it wasn’t on the charger. She didn’t like to use it in the house.
Celia grabbed on to that thought the same way she’d done with the memory of her age. It was something concrete, something solid that she knew about herself for certain. She avoided using her phone in the house because she didn’t want to be one of these people who mindlessly scrolled all day.
But she couldn’t find it in the bedroom, no matter how many drawers she opened or pockets she checked. She did note the type of clothes in the closet – conservative-looking sweaters and button-down blouses in low-key colors, lots of beige and gray and black and soft pastels. The sight of them made her feel, again, that these weren’t things she would have chosen for herself. She was more of a happy-print skirt and quirky T-shirt girl.
For a third time her forehead stabbed with pain, and she wondered if she needed to hydrate more, or perhaps a migraine was coming on.
A loud ringing echoed through the house, the sound of an old- fashioned rotary dial phone. The noise pulled Celia out of the bedroom and down the stairs in search of the source, and she ended up back in the kitchen, where she’d begun.
The ringing stopped before she entered the room. She stood in the doorway, irresolute, looking around for a wall unit before spotting the cell phone on the counter. The ringing must have come from the cell.
She picked up the phone – a couple of iterations out-of- date iPhone, which surprised her since the strange man seemed like the type to demand everything be top-of-the-line in his house – and tapped her finger on the bottom button to start it. A moment later, the home screen popped up, a picture of her own face mashed beside the strange man and the little girl, all of them smiling.
This is my family, Celia thought. This is my family, and I don’t even remember their names. I don’t even recognize them. At all.
Excerpted from Good Girls Don’t Die by Christina Henry Copyright © 2023 by Christina Henry. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
GOOD GIRLS DON’T DIE by Christina Henry
A sharp-edged, supremely twisty thriller about three women who find themselves trapped inside stories they know aren’t their own, from the author of Alice and Near the Bone.
Celia wakes up in a house that’s supposed to be hers. There’s a little girl who claims to be her daughter and a man who claims to be her husband, but Celia knows this family—and this life—is not hers…
Allie is supposed to be on a fun weekend trip—but then her friend’s boyfriend unexpectedly invites the group to a remote cabin in the woods. No one else believes Allie, but she is sure that something about this trip is very, very wrong…
Maggie just wants to be home with her daughter, but she’s in a dangerous situation and she doesn’t know who put her there or why. She’ll have to fight with everything she has to survive…
Three women. Three stories. Only one way out. This captivating novel will keep readers guessing until the very end.
Fantasy Dark | Suspense | Paranormal [Berkley, On Sale: November 14, 2023, Trade Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9780593638194 / ]
Buy GOOD GIRLS DON’T DIE: Amazon.com | Kindle | BN.com | Powell’s Books | Books-A-Million | Indie BookShops | Ripped Bodice | Love’s Sweet Arrow | Walmart.com | Target.com | Amazon CA | Amazon UK | Amazon DE | Amazon FR
About Christina Henry
CHRISTINA HENRY is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago and enjoys running long distances, reading anything she can get her hands on and watching movies with samurais, zombies and/or subtitles in her spare time. She lives in Chicago with her husband and son.
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