Today is my stop on the Blog Tour for Picture of Innocence by TJ Stimson where I've an extract from her latest novel. I was thrilled to be asked by Sabah Khan from Avon Books to take part along with some other fab book bloggers. You can find out who else is taking part in this fabulous Blog Tour at the end of the review so without further ado, here it is:
Lucas had told her to let the baby cry. That’s why they had been arguing. Lucas had told her to leave Noah. It was just colic, he’d grow out of it – Come on, Maddie, just leave him …
And then her memory simply snapped in half, like a spool of tape at the end of the reel.
She exhaled in frustration. She had no way of knowing if she and Lucas had argued five minutes or five hours ago. The doctor said her memory lapses were normal, the product of exhaustion and the pills she was on. Nothing to worry about, he said. Nothing to do with what had happened before. She had three children, two of them under three: of course she was tired! Of course she forgot things! It’d all sort itself out if she was patient.
But it was happening more and more often: whole blocks of time, lost for good. It’d started around the time she’d found out she was expecting Noah, and had got worse in the nine weeks since his birth. No one watching her would notice there was anything wrong. She didn’t collapse or black out. But suddenly, in the middle of doing something, she would find she couldn’t remember what had just happened. A few seconds, or a few minutes of her life, gone forever. Her memory stuttered and skipped like a home movie, with blank spaces where pivotal scenes should be.
All she could remember tonight was the baby screaming, Lucas rolling away from her in frustration …
Noah wasn’t screaming now.
Galvanised by fear, she sat up and switched on the nightlight. She’d been holding him in her arms, but they were empty now. He wasn’t in his cot, he wasn’t on the floor. She couldn’t see him. She leaped up from the chair in panic, and then she saw him, crushed against the back of the seat. Somehow, he’d slipped out of her arms and become wedged between her hip and the side of the rocking chair, his vulnerable head pressed against the wooden spindles. Terror flooded her as she crouched on the floor and pulled his limp body onto her lap. His eyes were closed, his face still and pale, except for the vivid red imprint of the chair on his cheek.
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