Novels by Yuna

My mother arrived at nine the next morning.I went downstairs to meet her because she was not the kind of person who navigated unfamiliar building entries without help and I wanted to be the first thing she encountered.She came through the front door with her bag and her blue cardigan and her red eyes that she was clearly pretending were not red."Mom," I said."I am fine," she said."I know," I said."I just cried a little in the car. It is done now.""Okay.""Is he—" She stopped."Upstairs," I said. "He is making tea."She pressed her lips together. "He always made terrible tea.""So do I apparently," I said. "It is genetic."She laughed, wet and surprised, and I put my arm through hers and walked her to the lift.I had thought about this moment for two days. Whether to be in the room or give them the room. Whether to have something playing in the background to ease the silence or let the silence do what it needed to do.In the end I did none of my planning.My father was in the ki

Planning Christmas turned out to be the most emotionally complicated thing I had done since the treatment chair.Which was saying something.I had a father coming who had been dead for twenty-five years. A mother who had kept him that way. A boyfriend who had never met either of them in the same room. And Audrey, who had invited herself before I finished the sentence, which I had expected.I stood in the middle of my living room on a Wednesday evening making a list and Joel watched me from the couch with the expression he got when he thought I was doing too much and was choosing not to say so yet."Say it," I said without turning around."I did not say anything.""You are thinking loudly."He shifted on the couch. "I was going to say that Christmas is three weeks away and you are planning it like a military operation.""It requires logistics.""It requires food and people who love each other," he said. "Which you already have."I looked at my list. Guest count. Sleeping arrangements.

The news about Robert Wells broke six days later.Not from Harper. Not from Carr. From a source she had not anticipated.Samuel Briggs, in the process of filing the public record correction, had submitted the documents to a legal archive database that was accessed by a journalist Harper did not know, a man named Ernest Powell who wrote about corporate accountability and had been following the 2001 pharmaceutical case for years as part of a larger piece on regulatory suppression.He published without contacting Harper first.The article was thorough and well-researched and named Robert Wells as alive.She found out at six-thirty on a Tuesday morning when Audrey called her."Have you seen it?" Audrey said.Harper was already on her phone reading it."Yes," she said."Are you okay?"She read the headline. The Man Who Reported It First: Robert Wells, Regulatory Suppression, and Twenty-Five Years in Hiding.She read the first three paragraphs.The piece was not unkind. It was actually accur

His name was not Robert Wells anymore.It had been David Reeve for twenty-five years, a name chosen quickly and lived in slowly until it fit the way names did when they had to.But to Harper, from the first minute, he was Dad.She did not say it out loud that first day. She was not ready to say it out loud. But she thought it constantly as she sat across from him in his small living room and they looked at each other across twenty-five years and tried to find the shape of something neither of them had language for yet.He made tea. He did it the same way she did, leaving it slightly too long, which made her laugh suddenly and him ask why and when she told him he looked at his mug and went quiet for a moment in the way of a man receiving something small that was also enormous.She asked him questions and he answered them honestly, which was the thing she had needed most. No managed versions. No protecting her. He told her about the threat in November 2001. The two men who came to the o

Joel drove her to Vermont.She had not asked him to. He had offered on a Tuesday evening when they were sitting on his couch and she had been quiet in the way she got when something was sitting on top of her and she had not agreed immediately because she was still learning to accept things without apologizing for needing them.She called him back an hour later and said yes.They left on a Saturday morning.The drive was four hours and Harper spent the first hour looking out the window at the city giving way to highway giving way to the kind of landscape that did not care about anything happening in anyone's personal life, which she found oddly comforting.Joel drove the way he did everything. Present and unhurried.Somewhere around the second hour she stopped watching the landscape and started watching him instead. The line of his jaw. The way his hand rested on the wheel. The small adjustments of a person fully at ease in their own body.He glanced over and caught her."What?" he sai

Her mother drove up on Friday.Harper had asked her to come in person because this was not a phone conversation. Some things needed faces.She heard the knock at her apartment door at four in the afternoon and stood in her hallway for three seconds before opening it.Connie Wells looked smaller than usual. Not physically. Just the particular smallness of a person who had been braced for something for a very long time and was now standing at its edge.Harper stepped back and let her in.They sat on the couch and for a moment neither of them spoke.Then her mother said, "I know you are angry.""I am," Harper said. Simply. No point dressing it up."I deserve it.""Yes." Harper looked at her hands. "And I also know you were twenty-nine years old with a four-year-old and a dead husband who was not dead and people who had threatened your family and no roadmap for any of it." She looked up. "I am holding both of those things, Mom. I need you to know that."Her mother's eyes filled."I though