For fans of Atomic City Girls and The Secrets We Kept, a fascinating debut historical novel of one of the most closely held secrets of World War II and a woman caught up in it when she follows her missing sister to the mysterious city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover an excerpt from Sarah James’s The Woman With Two Shadows, which is out July 26th 2022!
Lillian Kaufman hasn’t heard from her twin sister since Eleanor left for a mysterious job at an Army base somewhere in Tennessee. When she learns, on an unexpected phone call, that Eleanor is missing, Lillian takes a train from New York down to Oak Ridge to clear up the matter.
It turns out that the only way into Oak Ridge is to assume Eleanor’s identity, which Lillian plans to do swiftly and perfectly. But Eleanor has vanished without a trace—and she’s not the only one. And how do you find someone in a town so dangerous it doesn’t officially exist, when technically you don’t exist either?
Lillian is thrust into the epicenter of the gravest scientific undertaking of all time, with no idea who she can trust. And the more she pretends to be Eleanor, the more she loses her grip on herself.
On Saturday morning, Lillian rose early and pressed one week’s worth of white button-up blouses and gray wool skirts into the mustard suitcase with the torn lining and the squeaky clasp. (Eleanor, of course, had taken all the good suitcases.) It took her only five minutes to pack, after which she stood by the open suitcase and stared at the two neat stacks of gray and white. It had taken Eleanor hours to round up her makeup, her hairbrushes and curlers and pins, her earrings and berets and snoods. She’d laid dress after dress on the bed to analyze: this one, or that one? She’d muttered to herself for hours. These shoes go better with the yellow dress, but these shoes will go with the yellow dress and the blue polka-dot dress, so even though they don’t go as well with the yellow dress, perhaps they’d be a better use of space…
Lillian shut her case. The street outside was silent, most ofits usual inhabitants taking the weekend to sleep in a bit. The sound of the squeaky latch echoed throughout the empty room. To Lillian’s surprise, when she went into the kitchen for a piece of toast before departing, she found Mother at the table, sighing and wringing her hands. Mother rarely managed to get herself out of bed, let alone all the way downstairs to the kitchen. Lillian cursed her decision not to have skipped break- fast and headed directly for the train. She should have known any minute she spent in this house was a minute Mother could distract or delay her.
“Good morning,” said Lillian, heading directly for the bread box, afraid to even look her mother in the eye. “I’m not a fool,” said Mother.
Lillian tried not to register a reaction as she lifted the tin lid. “Oh? And who said you were?”
“I thought about it. I’m still capable of doing that, you know. Thinking. You announce two days before you are to leave that you’ll be going away? That’s not like you. You decided at age five where you would go to school, at age ten that you would never marry, at age fifteen the exact outfit you would wear every day for the rest of your life. She’s in trouble. Isn’t she?”
Lillian kept her back turned as she weighed her responses. Perhaps Mother deserved finally to know the truth. That’s what one of those philosophers (for the life of her, she couldn’t remember which one) from that ridiculous humanities course had argued: people deserve the truth because they are human. Lillian had been denying Mother’s very humanity by pretend- ing that Eleanor had written, by reading fake letters out loud, by writing down Mother’s dictation on notes that would only see the inside of a wastebasket, by pretending now that Eleanor was safe in Tennessee and not a thing was wrong in the world.
But does a person still deserve the truth if it’s become clear they can’t handle it, if it would be better off for them not to know?
It’s possible that she’s in trouble,” said Lillian, slowly, choosing her words ever so carefully: the truth, but not enough to cause either upset or undue hope. “I’m going to find out.” She turned around and watched her words hit Mother, watched them travel through her like a wave. Mother reached up to grab at her heart as if she could slow down its beating. She stood slowly, shakily, crossing the distance between the table and the countertop until she stood right in front of Lillian and placed a hand on her shoulder. The weight of it was strange at first, but after a moment Lillian was surprised to find it comforting.
Lillian’s heart swelled with pity. For almost a year after his death, Mother had refused to box up or get rid of any of Father’s clothes, as if he were away on business and would be back in the morning. One day the facade became too much. Mother found a giant pair of glinting silver scissors, sat in the master bedroom closet, and wailed. Lillian had found her clutching a piece of destroyed white cotton, kneeling in a mess of fabric scraps a foot deep, loose threads floating down around her like snowflakes. To live through two wars, to watch the army take away everyone she loved, one by one… Surely this was not the life she’d wanted for herself.
Lillian reached up to take Mother’s hand in her own. But Mother snatched her hand away.
“It should have been you,” she said.
And just in case the gravity and the cruelty of the words hadn’t pierced the armor around Lillian’s heart, she repeated it. “It should have been you.” With that, she turned on her heel and fled the kitchen with a strength and speed that Lillian did not know she possessed.
