Wendy Walker - All Is Not Forgotten - The bestselling gripping thriller you’ll never forget

WENDY WALKERhas worked as an attorney specialising in family law. She lives in Connecticut where she is at work on her next novel.

For Andrew, Ben, and Christopher

While the drug treatment in this novel does not currently exist in its entirety, the altering of both the factual and emotional memories of trauma is at the forefront of emerging research and technology in memory science. Researchers have successfully altered factual memories and mitigated the emotional impact of memories with the drugs and therapies described in this book, and they continue to search for a drug to target and erase those memories completely. While the original intention of drug therapies to alter memories was to treat soldiers in the field and mitigate the onset of PTSD, its use in the civilian world has already begun—and will likely be extremely controversial.

It would require an entirely new novel to recount the journey that resulted in the writing and publication of All Is Not Forgotten. While the actual writing time was about ten weeks, it also took me seventeen years, four other novels, two screenplays, one legal career, three children and enough angst to fill Dr. Forrester’s calendar for many years. Writing can be hard. Knowing what to write is even harder. I feel blessed, humbled and grateful that I found my way to telling this story.

To that end, I begin my acknowledgments with my agent, Wendy Sherman, for knowing what I should write, and for her patience while I got my head around a new genre. Her abilities to read a writer and know the market are truly spectacular. I owe many thanks as well to my editor and publisher in the U.S., Jennifer Enderlin, for her unwavering enthusiasm, and to Lisa Senz, Dori Weintraub and the entire team at St. Martin’s Press, and in the U.K. to the team at HQ including Lisa Milton, Sally Williamson and Alison Lindsay for their extraordinary efforts to publish this book with precision, but also with genuine passion for the project. On the west coast, my gratitude goes out to my film rights agent, Michelle Weiner at CAA, for knowing we would be in such good hands with Reese Witherspoon and Bruna Papandrea at Pacific Standard Films, and Warner Brothers. And for placing the book with some of the finest publishers quite literally around the globe, thank you to foreign rights agent Jenny Meyer. It has been such a joy for me to work with so many talented professionals.

While I accept full credit for all liberties taken in my description of memory science and psychology, I am indebted to Dr. Felicia Rozek, PhD, for providing brilliant insight into the psychological dynamics of the characters and events, and to Dr. Efrat Ginot, PhD, and author of The Neuropsychology of the Unconscious: Integrating Brain and Mind in Psychotherapy, for educating me on the science behind memory loss, recovery and reconsolidation.

On a personal note, I owe many, many thanks to: my fellow writers who courageously stare down blank pages every day and still managed to read my work, assuage my doubts, and lend a hand – Jane Green, Beatriz Williams, Jamie Beck, John Lavitt and Mari Passananti; my trusted readers and ‘plot testers’ who balanced honesty with encouragement – Valerie Rosenberg, Joan Gray, Diane Powis and Cynthia Badan; my beloved friends who support me unconditionally; my patient partner Hugh Hall; and my courageous, complicated and beautiful family who believe in hard work and big dreams.

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Copyright

He followed herthrough the woods behind the house. The ground there was littered with winter debris, dead leaves and twigs that had fallen over the past six months and decayed beneath a blanket of snow. She may have heard him approach. She may have turned and seen him wearing the black wool mask whose fibers were found beneath her nails. As she fell to her knees, what was left of the brittle twigs snapped like old bones and scraped her bare skin. Her face and chest pressed hard into the ground, likely with the outside of his forearm, she would have felt the mist from the sprinklers blowing off the lawn not twenty feet away. Her hair was wet when they found her.

When she was a younger girl, she would chase the sprinklers at her own house, trying to catch them on a hot summer afternoon, or dodge them on a crisp spring evening. Her baby brother would then chase her, buck naked with his bulging belly and flailing arms that were not quite able to coordinate with his little legs. Sometimes their dog would join in, barking so voraciously, it would drown out their laughter. An acre of green grass, slippery and wet. Big open skies with puffy white clouds. Her mother inside watching them from the window and her father on his way home from places whose smells would linger on his suit. The stale coffee from the showroom office, new leather, tire rubber. Those memories were painful now, though she had turned immediately to them when asked about the sprinklers, and whether they had been on when she ran across the lawn to the woods.

The rape lasted for close to an hour. It seems impossible that they could know this. Something about the clotting of the blood at the points of penetration, and the varied stages of bruising on her back, arms, and neck where he’d changed his method of constraint. In that hour, the party had continued the way she’d left it. She would have seen it from where she lay, lights glaring from the windows, flickering as bodies moved through the rooms. It was a big party, with nearly all the tenth grade and handfuls of kids from ninth and eleventh making appearances. Fairview High School was small by most standards, even for suburban Connecticut, and the class divisions that existed elsewhere were far looser here. Sports teams were mixed, plays, concerts, and the like. Even some classes crossed grade boundaries, with the smartest kids in math and foreign languages moving up a level. Jenny Kramer had never made it into an advanced class. But she believed herself to be smart, and endowed with a fierce sense of humor. She was also a good athlete—swimming, field hockey, tennis. But she felt none of those things had mattered until her body matured.

The night of this party had felt better than any moment in her life. I think she may even have said, It was going to be the best night of my life. After years of what I have come to think of as adolescent cocooning, she felt she had come into her own. The cruelty of braces and lingering baby fat, breasts that were too small for a bra but still protruding through her T-shirts, acne and unruly hair, had finally gone away. She had been the “tomboy,” the friend, the confidante to boys who were always interested in other girls. Never in her. These were her words, not mine, although I feel she described them quite well for a fifteen-year-old. She was unusually self-aware. In spite of what her parents and teachers had drilled into her, into all of them, she believed—and she was not alone among her peers in this—that beauty was still the most valuable asset to a girl in Fairview. Finally having it had felt like winning the lottery.