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****Hannah Mary McKinnon’s HER SECRET SON is
#58 in the never-ending series called INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION where
the Chris Rice Cooper Blog (CRC)
focuses on one specific excerpt from a fiction genre and how that fiction
writer wrote that specific excerpt. All INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION links
are at the end of this piece.
Name of fiction work? And were there other names
you considered that you would like to share with us? My third
novel is called Her Secret
Son. I never get
hung up about (or too fond of) the original titles I give my novels because I
know they’ll more than likely change. Actually, I often hope they do because the
sales & marketing geniuses at MIRA (HarperCollins) have far better ideas
than me. I’d originally called this book THE SON, just to give it a name, then THE
BOY IN THE RAIN, which was too melancholy. When my editor pitched Her
Secret Son as an alternative title, I fell in love with it immediately.
Has this been published? And it is
totally fine if the answer is no. If yes, what publisher and what publication
date? Her
Secret Son was published in
paperback, eBook and audiobook formats on May 28, 2019 by MIRA (HarperCollins).
What is the date you began writing this piece of
fiction and the date when you completely finished the piece of fiction? I started
writing the novel around June 2017, and the final copy-edits were done almost a
year later. In between I worked on editing my second novel, The Neighbors (MIRA, March 2018)
and outlining my fourth. I often flip from one project to another, depending on
where we’re at in the process. I find it next to impossible not to be working
on something.
Where did you do most of your writing
for this fiction work? And please describe in detail. And can you please
include a photo? I write mainly in my home office,
and while I occasionally work at the library or a coffee shop, the vast
majority of my writing time is spent at home. I share the office with my husband Rob, who runs an electrical business,
so it’s filled with the company’s files, too. Of course there’s also a book
case stuffed with my “to read” pile. I’m quite happy sitting in the peace and
quiet during the day, or late into the night. In the summer I’ll migrate to the
garden with my laptop, and the fireplace in the living room keeps me toasty
during the winter.
What
were your writing habits while writing this work- did you drink something as
you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop;
specific time of day? A huge jug of water, some cups
of tea. I’m not a coffee drinker (maybe that’s why I don’t write at coffee
shops). I’ll sometimes listen to music but it’ll be chill-out tunes, nothing
with lyrics as I find them distracting. I write on my pc, although I’ll edit at
least one round of the manuscript manually with a big fat red pen (which
results in a bloodbath). I tend to write in the morning, once my kids have left
for school and I’ve been to the gym for a workout to get my brain going.
What is the summary of this specific fiction
work? How
far would you go to protect the ones you love…when they may not be yours to
protect?
When Josh’s longtime partner, Grace,
dies in a tragic accident, he is left with a mess of grief—and full custody of
her seven-year-old son, Logan. While not his biological father, Josh has been a
dad to Logan in every way that counts, and with Grace gone, Logan needs him
more than ever.
Wanting to do right by Logan, Josh begins the process of becoming his legal guardian—something that seems suddenly urgent, though Grace always brushed it off as an unnecessary formality. But now, as Josh struggles to find the paperwork associated with Logan’s birth, he begins to wonder whether there were more troubling reasons for Grace’s reluctance to make their family official.
As he digs deeper into the past of the woman he loved, Josh soon finds that there are many dark secrets to uncover, and that the truth about where Logan came from is much more sinister than he could have imagined…
Wanting to do right by Logan, Josh begins the process of becoming his legal guardian—something that seems suddenly urgent, though Grace always brushed it off as an unnecessary formality. But now, as Josh struggles to find the paperwork associated with Logan’s birth, he begins to wonder whether there were more troubling reasons for Grace’s reluctance to make their family official.
As he digs deeper into the past of the woman he loved, Josh soon finds that there are many dark secrets to uncover, and that the truth about where Logan came from is much more sinister than he could have imagined…
Tightly paced and brimming with
tension, Her Secret Son is a heartbreakingly honest portrait of a
family on the edge of disaster and a father desperate to hold on to the boy who
changed his life.
Please include just one excerpt and include page
numbers as reference. This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you
prefer.
Chapter
1 (pages 11 – 16)
They say the lucky ones experience an incredible,
life-defining moment, a moment they can point back to as the second everything
changed. Maybe it was sitting down on the bus next to a stranger who became the
love of their life. Or witnessing the birth of a child they were told they’d
never conceive. Perhaps getting that elusive break the day the boss had flu,
launching a career that, until then, was only the stuff of dreams.
And then there are the others.
People like me, who have life-shattering moments instead. We’re the ones who
want to believe we’ve had more than our fair share of bad luck, enough
misfortune to last multiple lives over. We get comfortable, believe nothing
else can go wrong because fate has already played with us the most, seen how
far we can be stretched and bent, twisted into the shape of a pretzel before
becoming brittle and shattering into a million pieces.
For me, one of these moments
came late one Friday morning as I stood in Harlan Gingold’s dark, wood-paneled
study, the musty air closing in on me. I pulled at the neck of my sweater in a
futile attempt to cool down. I’d forgotten how warm he kept this room, as if he
secretly longed to be a gecko under a heat lamp and pretend he was somewhere
far closer to the equator than the outskirts of Albany, in upstate New York.
His study smelled of expensive
whisky and Cuban cigars, wizened fingers left to linger in an ashtray. A
stereotypical rich man’s man-cave, complete with leather armchairs and
gold-lettered law books Harlan no doubt cited by heart when he valiantly
fought—and usually won—his cases in court, something he’d done for longer than
I’d been alive.
We were going over the quote for the pool
house extension and elaborate backyard revamp he’d promised his wife for the
spring. While he checked the details again, running an index finger down the
page, I tried to ignore the buzz of my mobile in my back pocket. Harlan was the
kind of man who commanded nothing but your undivided attention. In this case I
couldn’t blame him. Not with the amount of zeros he was writing on the deposit
check my bosses had sent me to collect.
My phone rang a second time.
While Harlan put the final flourish on the paperwork with his thick Mont Blanc
fountain pen, I slid my mobile from my pocket and glanced at the screen. My
neighbor’s number. Nothing unusual in itself. Mrs. Banks often called for a
hand around the house—putting together yet another of her bookcases, repairing
the front door, unblocking a sink. Nothing that couldn’t wait or would justify
the lecture about people’s dependence on technology Harlan would no doubt
dispense if I answered.
“There you go, Josh,” he said
as he handed me the check.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll see you
next month?”
“Yes. I’ve no doubt you’ll do a
great job, as always. My yard has never looked better. Those Fraser firs were
the talk of the street when they were lit up for Christmas. Even Ivan was
impressed.”
I grinned, thinking I’d enjoy
ribbing Ivan about not paying the compliment forward. I wouldn’t give him too
much of a hard time. He’d become my best mate since we’d met a few years back,
and since then he’d pointed a number of his friends and colleagues my way,
including the firm’s biggest cheese and Ivan’s uncle, Mr. Harlan Gingold
himself. When I’d told Ivan I owed him one, he’d cheerily replied, “Better make
it a big one, whatever it is,” before graciously settling for a pair of
football tickets I’d got on the cheap.
Harlan accompanied me to the
front porch where he shook my hand as I ignored the ongoing buzzing of my
phone. He lifted his nose toward the dark gray, early March skies, swirling
with ominous fast-moving clouds, and breathed in deep, nostrils flaring.
“Something wicked this way comes,” he said. “You’d better batten down the
hatches, son. You Brits aren’t used to our snow. Tell that lovely wife of yours
to keep you safe.”
I didn’t bother reminding him
Grace and I weren’t married, or argue that, despite my strong British accent,
I’d lived in the US for twenty years. I was only too familiar with the
legendary winters. For crying out loud, the city competed in the annual Golden
Snowball Award, although it regularly lost to Syracuse. As Grace once said,
upstate New York was where lake effect and nor’easter storms mated, making
trillions of snowflake babies, and everyone’s life beneath a frozen misery.
When we’d said our goodbyes, I
finally pulled my phone from my pocket and trudged to my truck, glancing at the
darkening skies, thinking Harlan’s prophecy could turn out to be the
understatement of the season. Not that I’d mind a blizzard, within reason,
anyway. It was Friday, the weekend gloriously stretching out ahead of us. As
far as I knew, work didn’t need me, and Grace hadn’t mentioned any special
plans. So what if we couldn’t leave the house? It would mean a family weekend;
Grace, Logan and I huddled under the blankets in front of the TV, eating
popcorn and watching movies, exactly the way we liked it.
If I’d known what was actually
coming, how my life was about to be forever, indelibly changed, I wouldn’t have
grabbed my mobile so hastily. I’d have taken a few moments to savor how my life
had become simple again, full of uncomplicated, innocuous decisions. I’d have
mulled over my mundane lunch choices. Thought about which film Grace and I
would watch once we’d tucked Logan up in his bed. What Grace and I would do to
each other later, after we’d headed upstairs, too. I’d have enjoyed the
excitement building in my gut when I pictured the ring I’d hidden at the back
of my sock drawer, a gold band solitaire I’d saved up for over the last year in
the hope Grace would say yes this time.
But I didn’t do any of that.
Instead I unlocked my phone, looked at all the missed calls from Mrs. Banks and
dialed voice mail. My brow furrowed as I listened to her message. She sounded
unusually high-pitched and grating, breathless, even, as if she were in the
middle of a ten-mile run. A feat in itself considering she was in her
midseventies and walked with a stick.
“Josh, it’s Mrs. Banks,” she
said. “There’s been an accident. Can you call me? Please. It’s urgent.
Call me now.”
I pushed a hand against the
truck to steady myself. Perhaps her grandson had put his soccer ball through
our bathroom window again. Or maybe the mangy dog who’d been hanging around the
house, the one I’d caught Logan feeding his breakfast to, had dug up the tulip
bulbs Grace replanted twice already. Although I grabbed hold of both ideas like
a shipwrecked man to driftwood, I knew from Mrs. Banks’s voice it was more
serious. Way more serious. My next thoughts went to Logan, peppering my brain
like fully automatic gunfire.
He’s hurt. Grace can’t call.
She’s with him. She told Mrs. Banks to phone. How bad is it? He’s only seven.
Christ! What’s going on?
When I tried to hit redial, I
missed the button four times, my fingers—thick and limp as raw
sausages—impossible to maneuver. Finally I pressed the phone to my ear, and
Mrs. Banks picked up on the first ring.
“Josh! Oh, thank goodness.” Her
voice sounded shakier than before, and I could barely make out her words with
the crackling and whooshing of the wind in my ear.
“What’s happened?” I said, an
icy hand sneaking its way down to my stomach, grabbing hold of my innards and
yanking hard. “Is Logan okay? Where is he? Has he—”
“It’s not Logan…it’s…it’s…”
Saliva collected in my mouth as
Mrs. Banks stopped talking. Just as I was about to shout into the phone, demand
she tell me what was going on, she very quietly said, “It’s Grace.”
My stomach lurched, threatened
to empty itself right there on Harlan’s driveway. I’d been so sure Logan was
hurt, I thought I’d misheard, but she said it again. “It’s Grace.”
I opened and closed my mouth
three times, my tongue refusing to form a single syllable until I finally
managed, “Is she okay? What happened?”
“I was drinking my coffee by
the window—” Mrs. Banks’s voice sped up, an out-of-control freight train
barreling straight toward me “—when I saw Grace taking out the garbage and…and,
oh, Josh…she slipped on the steps.” Her words came out garbled now, making it
harder for my brain to process what it already struggled to decode. “She went
down.”
“Where is she?”
Mrs. Banks’s voice fell to a strained whisper, as if she were
pressing a hand over her throat, trying to keep her next sentence inside. “When
she didn’t get back up, I—”
“Where is she?”
“—ran over and…and…” Her voice
tailed off, the last syllables gobbled up by a sob. “We’re outside. The
ambulance is here. And the police. You need to come home. Please, come home now.”
“But Grace is okay? Has she
broken anything? Can I talk to her?” Silence. “Mrs. Banks, please. Is
she okay?”
More silence, a whisper. “I
don’t think so, Josh. I really don’t think so.”
Yes, this was one of those
life-shattering moments, an instance I’d point to in the future and say it was
the second everything changed. And I was right.
Except
that worse—far, far worse—was still to come.
Were there any deletions from this
excerpt that you can share with us? And can you please include a photo of your
marked up rough drafts of this excerpt. Actually,
I didn’t delete very much from this first chapter because I typically write up,
i.e. I write a very sparse first draft, then layer and add more as the
characters and story take shape. Unfortunately I don’t have a marked up rough
draft to share, as I recycle them all.
Other works you have published? My first novel was the rom-com Time After Time, which published in
June 2016. Think lovechild of the movies Groundhog
Day and Sliding Doors. After that
I moved over to the darker side of domestic suspense/drama.
The Neighbors was my second novel—a
story about an ex-boyfriend moving in next door. The two individuals haven’t
seen each other in over a decade and, in their wisdom, decide not to tell their
respective partners with whom they have children that they used to be lovers.
Secrets, lies, betrayal…and lots and lots of trouble!
My fourth novel (currently titled SISTER
DEAR) is another suspense story about half-sisters, and is slated for a spring
2020 publication.
Anything you would like to add? I think we’ve covered it all. I’d like to thank everyone who chooses to read my novels. It’s a privilege I don’t take lightly, and I hope they find it time well spent.
Hannah Mary was born in the UK, grew up in Switzerland and moved
to Canada in 2010. After a successful career in recruitment, she quit the
corporate world in favor of writing. She lives in Oakville, Ontario, with her
husband and three sons, and is delighted by her twenty-second
commute. She is always happy to join
book clubs, chat in person or onling. So
please contact her.
Facebook www.facebook.com/
Instagram @HannahMary
McKinnon
McKinnon
Twitter @HannahM
McKinnon
McKinnon
INSIDE THE EMOTION OF
FICTION links
001 11 15 2018 Nathaniel
Kaine’s
Thriller Novel
John
Hunter – The Veteran
002 11 18 2018 Ed
Protzzel’s
Futuristic/Mystery/Thriller
The
Antiquities Dealer
003 11 23 2018 Janice
Seagraves’s
Science
Fiction Romance
Exodus
Arcon
004 11 29 2018
Christian Fennell’s
Literary
Fiction Novel
The Fiddler
in the Night
005 12 02 2018 Jessica
Mathews’s
Adult
Paranormal Romance
Death
Adjacent
006 12 04 2018 Robin Jansen’s
Literary
Fiction Novel
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Indomitable
007 12 12 2018 Adair Valerez’s
Literary
Fiction Novel
Scrim
008 12 17 218
Kit Frazier’s
Mystery Novel
Dead Copy
009 12 21 2019 Robert Craven’s
Noir/Spy Novel
The Road
of a Thousand Tigers
010 01 13 2019 Kristine Goodfellow’s
Contemporary
Romantic Fiction
The Other
Twin
011 01 17 2019 Nancy J Cohen’s
Cozy Mystery
Trimmed To
Death
012 01 20 2019 Charles Salzberg’s
Crime Novel
Second
Story Man
013 01 23 2019 Alexis Fancher’s
Flash Fiction
His Full
Attention
014 01 27 2019 Brian L Tucker’s
Young Adult/Historical
POKEWEED: AN ILLUSTRATED NOVELLA
015 01 31 2019 Robin Tidwell’s
Dystopian
Reduced
016 02 07 2019 J.D. Trafford’s
Legal
Fiction/Mystery
Little Boy
Lost
017 02 08 2019 Paula Shene’s
Young Adult
ScieFi/Fantasy/Romance/Adventure
My Quest
Begins
018 02 13 2019 Talia Carner’s
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Moscow
019 02 15 2019 Rick Robinson’s
Multidimensional
Fiction
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Alley
020 02 21 2019 LaVerne Thompson’s
Urban Fantasy
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Collectors
021 02 27 2019 Marlon L Fick’s
Post-Colonialist
Novel
The
Nowhere Man
022 03 02 2019 Carol Johnson’s
Mainstream
Novel
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Ashes
023 03 06 2019 Samuel Snoek-Brown’s
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Collection
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No Other Way to Worship Them
024 03 08 2019 Marlin Barton’s
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Collection
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025 03 18 2019 Laura Hunter’s
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Mother
026 03 21 2019 Maggie Rivers’s
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027 03 25 2019 Faith
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028 03 27 2019 Valerie Nieman’s
Tall Tale
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Bones
029 04 04 2019 Betty Bolte’s
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Romance
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Visions of Love
030 04 05 2019 Marianne
Maili’s
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Lucy, go
see
031 04 10 2019 Gregory Erich Phillips’s
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032 04 15 2019 Jason Ament’s
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033 04 24 2019 Stephen P. Keirnan’s
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Novel
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Baker’s Secret
034 05 01 2019 George Kramer’s
Fantasy
Arcadis:
Prophecy Book
035 05 05 2019 Erika Sams’s
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Go
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039 05 12 2019 Edward DeVito’s
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Romance
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Christian Romance
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Miguel – Love’s Legacy: Prequel to The Naomi
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046 06 04 2019 Jeanne Mackin’s
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Coco
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047 06 07 2019 Philip Shirley’s
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048 06 08 2019 Bonnie Kistler’s
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055 06 29 2019
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056 07 02 2019 Randee Green’s
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057 07 03 2019 Saralyn Ricahrd’s
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#058 07 04 2019 Hannah Mary McKinnon’s
Domestic
Suspense
Her Secret
Son
