The Choice Read online

  Praise for The Choice

  “I literally could not put this book down. This isn’t a far-fetched psychological thriller; this is a deeply human novel about a split-second, life-changing decision any woman could find herself having to make. What would I do? I found myself asking, from the very first page. Razor-sharp, brilliantly written, and utterly gripping. Highly recommended.”

  —Rosie Walsh, author of Ghosted

  “A terrific premise, delivered with panache.”

  —Clare Mackintosh, author of I Let You Go

  “Assured and gripping.”

  —Alex Marwood, author of The Wicked Girls

  “An addictive, exciting, and devilishly clever book.”

  —Holly Seddon, author of Try Not to Breathe

  Praise for The Good Sister

  “With fast-paced prose and several unexpected twists, [Gillian McAllister] skillfully weaves a web in which any of the characters might be the guilty party. . . . A suspenseful courtroom drama full of poignant flashbacks and unique insights.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “British author McAllister makes her US debut with this riveting psychological thriller. . . . Authentic courtroom scenes, intricate family dynamics, the conflicts of motherhood, and a shocking ending all add up to a winner.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “This deeply felt, emotional story will appeal to readers of Jodi Picoult, who frequently mixes legal intrigue and strong character development.”

  —Booklist

  “Such a perfect balance of courtroom drama and family drama, so smooth and assured, it just flowed, seamlessly. I loved every page, every character, every twist and turn.”

  —Lisa Jewell, author of Then She Was Gone

  “This is a deeply gratifying, taut courtroom drama and so much more. I don’t know how Gillian did it, but I’m so happy she did.”

  —Caroline Kepnes, author of You and Providence

  ALSO BY GILLIAN McALLISTER

  The Good Sister

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Gillian McAllister

  First published in 2018 by Penguin Books/Penguin UK under the title Anything You Do Say.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: McAllister, Gillian, author.

  Title: The choice / Gillian McAllister.

  Other titles: Anything you do say

  Description: First American edition. | New York : G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2020. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020015478 (print) | LCCN 2020015479 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593188002 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780593188019 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PR6113.C28 A85 2020 (print) | LCC PR6113.C28 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015478

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015479

  First American edition published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2020

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  To Suzanne, my sister and a doctor.

  Here’s to all the texts that begin: What if . . . and your responses:

  It’s quite complicated, but . . .

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Praise for The Choice and The Good Sister

  Also by Gillian McAllister

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  One Year and Ten Months LaterChapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Two Months LaterChapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  It starts with a selfie. He is a random; we are not even sure of his name. We are always meeting them whenever we go out. Laura says it’s because I look friendly. I think it’s because I am always daydreaming, making up lives for people as I stare at them, and they think I’m inviting them over to chat.

  In the frame of his phone screen—camera facing forward, to us—his teeth are white and slightly crooked, his nose hooked.

  Laura leans over to press the button on the phone. Her long, slender arm is captured at the edge of the display. It’s covered in bangles and bits of thread and a homemade bracelet. She’s a hippie at heart.

  She takes the photo, and now we are frozen on his screen. I wonder if he’ll keep it, that photograph of us that now belongs to him.

  “No filter,” he says to us.

  “What?” Laura says.

  She doesn’t use Instagram. She feels no need to check into places or share her moments with anybody. She is nowhere on the internet, and I’m sure her life is better for it.

  We break apart from our tableau at the bar, but he stays standing next to me. He rocks up and down on the balls of his feet. He’s all in black, except his red trainers.

  I turn to Laura. She’s had her hair cut. It’s a pixie again: messed up, the fringe sitting in her eyes. She looks androgynous, slightly goofy. I could never pull off that haircut. People would mistake me for a child. She never wears any makeup, but doesn’t need to, with straight, white teeth, naturally peach cheeks, and dark lashes. Her eyes crinkle at the corners even when she is not smiling. What she wants more than anything is to be an artist—she creates hyperreal paintings that look like photographs—and she doesn’t want to live her life like other peo
ple do. She’s obsessed with it. She will sometimes say things like, “What’s the correlation between wearing a suit and doing a good job?” or, “Why do you need a house in the suburbs and a mortgage like everybody else?”

  I would never say such things.

  “Great shoes,” she says now, dipping her head down underneath the bar.

  They’re new. Cream silk, with ribbons that tie at my ankles. Laura favors flats, the sides of her feet dry and hard from never wearing shoes at home. They live on a barge, Laura and Jonty. They moor it wherever they like. I sometimes want to do the same, bored of our tiny basement flat, but Reuben tells me I’d hate it, that I am a fantasist.

  “Thanks,” I say. I bought them on a credit card, at almost midnight, the other night. I’d forgotten until they had arrived, experiencing a familiar sense of wonderment, and then recognition, as I tore into the parcel.

  “Are they Reuben approved?” Laura says.

  Reuben is one of the only people she consistently misreads. She converts his shyness into something else. Disapproval, maybe. She might be right. He had raised his eyebrows as I unpacked the shoes, but said nothing.

  I shrug now. “What’s his is ours,” I say, though I’m embarrassed by the notion. Reuben works far harder than I do. Everybody does.

  Laura’s bony shoulders are out, even though it’s December. Her top is simple, a plain white vest that’s too big for her. It’s the kind of material that doesn’t need pressing. I don’t iron anything. If I ever try to, our iron deposits a brown sticky substance everywhere, and so I have given up. In my head, I call it my Joanna-ness: situations in which I fail where most others succeed.

  “Looks like you’ve got a friend for life,” she says.

  I turn. The man is still standing next to me. I can feel the entire length of his leg against mine as he shifts his weight, trying to get the bartender’s attention.

  “Two more for these ladies?” he says.

  We say yes to the drinks, and maybe we shouldn’t. We are becoming giggly. They arrive, placed on black napkins that dampen with condensation from the glasses. Laura sidles slowly away along the bar.

  I follow, but so does he.

  “Your work or mine?” Laura says, her head bent toward me so that he can’t hear.

  This is how our long chats begin. We once joked we should have an agenda, and now we kind of do: work, relationships, family. Then everything else. Whatever comes up.

  I let out a sigh, but it does nothing to dispel the knots that have appeared as soon as she mentions work. “I did a sudoku puzzle on my lunch break that was more stimulating than my entire day yesterday.”

  I started work on the mobile library bus because I loved it so much as a child. I loved choosing a fat new stack of books to read that week. I loved the nooks and crannies and finding my brother hiding in the thriller section. But after six years in the job, that isn’t enough anymore.

  “Mmm.” She sucks in her bottom lip, looking thoughtfully across the bar.

  We hate our jobs in completely different ways. I have no idea what I would like to do. Laura knows exactly what she wants to do, and can’t do it.

  “You need a Thing. I need not to have a Thing,” she says.

  “Yep. That’s about it.” Nobody else could say something like that to me, except maybe Reuben. “I’m one-dimensional,” I say to her.

  “You’re too smart for your own good,” she says back.

  “No. I’m the thick Murphy.”

  My brother, Wilf, went to Cambridge, and now owns a whole host of London properties, and none of us can ever forget it.

  “You’re a very bright Joanna,” she says. “Oliva or Murphy.” Oliva. Reuben’s surname.

  I look down at my drink, stirring it with the black straw whose end I’ve chewed. Reuben says I should just forget it. Stop torturing myself. Nobody truly has a Thing.

  “Er,” Laura says, looking at a spot just above my head, as though she’s seen a spider on the wall.

  I turn, and the man is leaning over me, a protective arm right behind my shoulders. Now that I know he’s there, I can feel every molecule of him. His arm lands across my back like a heavy rucksack, and I wince. I try to shrug it off, but he claps it down on me. It’s weighty, unpleasant. My body is against his, unwittingly, and his armpit is warm and sweaty against my shoulder. He smells beery, of that sweet alcoholic scent usually reserved for the morning after the night before. A kick of mint behind that. He’s chewing gum.

  “Haven’t even introduced myself,” he says, interrupting my thoughts. “I’m Sadiq.” His dark eyes appraise us. He holds a hand out to me, then to Laura.

  She ignores it, but I take it, not wanting to offend. He passes me a business card, in his hand, as swiftly and smoothly as a spy. Sadiq Ul-Haq. I don’t know what to do with it, so I tuck it into my purse, barely reading it.

  “Thanks. I don’t have one,” I say back.

  “Thanks for the selfie, but we’re good now,” Laura interrupts. “Just catching up. Alone.”

  Even this does not put him off. “Baby, don’t be cold,” Sadiq says.

  I can’t help but look sideways at him. I can’t place his lilting accent.

  “We’re not cold. We want to speak to each other, not you,” Laura says.

  It’s typical of her. All through university, people would underestimate her. She was softly spoken, small-boned, would sit almost huddled, with her arms folded right across her middle, so people thought she was meek. But she wasn’t, not at all.

  She wordlessly picks up her drink, and we walk across the makeshift dance floor, squeezing against bodies that jolt unpredictably. The only place available is right next to the speaker, which is pumping out a dance hit I would have loved five years ago. It’s thrumming in my ear, the bass reverberating in my sternum. Opposite me, I can see a couple standing close to each other. The woman has an Afro, a slim waist exposed between a black top and trousers. The man’s hand is on the wall behind her. He’s talking softly in her ear. I wonder what their evenings look like. I bet they listen to indie music on the radio while cooking from scratch. Or maybe they paint together, every Sunday: a weekend ritual. Abstract art. It would get all over their clothes, their walls, but they wouldn’t care.

  She catches me looking, and for the millionth time in my life, I am pleased that nobody can read my mind. She draws a hand up to her hair, embarrassed. I look away, but not before noticing that her nails are painted a jewel-toned plum, glossy and perfectly even. Ah. She is one of those. A Proper Person, I call them in my head. Proper People have well-fitting clothes and neat hair and glowing skin. You can break it all down into its component parts, but the thing is—they just look . . . groomed. They are doing something right. Something intangible. I wonder if they’ve all been told, like some rite of passage, and I haven’t.

  “What?” Laura says, following my gaze.

  “Oh, look,” I say, as the couple embrace again.

  “Oh to be young and in love,” she says.

  I look curiously at her. I realize that I no longer see Jonty kiss her. Their relationship seems pally, somehow, more about teamwork than romance. No doubt she thinks the same of Reuben and me. Reuben seems reserved, remote, dismissive. Until the door closes behind us, that is.

  “He was a weird one,” Laura shouts, pointing with her drink over to the bar. “Sadiq.”

  “I know.”

  “Pushy.”

  “Oh, he’ll leave us alone now.”

  Laura raises her eyebrows but says nothing. “Jonty is acting strangely,” she says after a moment.

  I look up in surprise. “Really?”

  “He said he didn’t like my latest project. He’s never said that. He’s never cared.”

  “No?”

  She rakes her fringe back. It snarls, sticking up slightly before drifting down. She puffs air into her
cheeks.

  Lovely Jonty; he’s been sacked from every office job he’s ever had because of lateness. He often forgets he’s going on holiday and has to be ushered to the airport in surprise. Posh and affable and a bit hopeless: What he wants more than anything is a quiet life, a G and T in his hand. I like to consider what everybody I meet truly wants. I started doing it when I was a teenager, and I haven’t been able to stop.

  “What’s going on with him?” I say, frowning.

  He has been temping recently, painting perfume bottles with glitter for the Christmas season. He says it’s quite meditative.

  “I have no idea. Do you?”

  I am often asked for advice about people. Nothing else, of course. Nothing highbrow. I am never asked for my opinion on medicine or law or planning permission or transfer deadline day or the war in Syria. Just people, and the things they do.

  “What’s he saying to you?”

  “Nothing. Just—talking about the future more, maybe.” She shrugs.

  She doesn’t want to discuss it any further, I can see.

  “How’s that master’s?” she adds.

  “What master’s?” I ask absentmindedly.

  “The cultural theory one.”

  I frown. It does ring a bell. “Oh, still pending,” I say vaguely.

  I am forever applying for master’s courses and grants and pitching articles to The Guardian and thinking maybe I would like to be a coffee-shop owner. Maybe I will farm cocoa beans in South America? I will WhatsApp Laura. You burn too easily, though, she will send back. Maybe wheat in England instead? And even though it’s endless, my career pondering, and must be tedious, she takes each and every whim as seriously as the first.

  “Good luck,” she says with a smile. She looks like she’s going to add something else, but then her gaze drifts to just behind me, and she never starts her sentence. Or rather, she starts a different one. “Okay, leaving time,” she says.

  I look behind me, and there’s Sadiq. I shrug, irritated, and move away a few feet, but he follows, an arm reaching out.

  “Leave us alone,” Laura says.