Paloma thought her perfect life would begin once she was adopted and made it to America, but she’s about to find out that no matter how far you run, your past always catches up to you… Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Amanda Jayatissa’s My Sweet Girl, which releases on September 14th 2021.
Ever since she was adopted from a Sri Lankan orphanage, Paloma has had the best of everything—schools, money, and parents so perfect that she fears she’ll never live up to them.
Now at thirty years old and recently cut off from her parents’ funds, she decides to sublet the second bedroom of her overpriced San Francisco apartment to Arun, who recently moved from India. Paloma has to admit, it feels good helping someone find their way in America—that is until Arun discovers Paloma’s darkest secret, one that could jeopardize her own fragile place in this country.
Before Paloma can pay Arun off, she finds him face down in a pool of blood. She flees the apartment but by the time the police arrive, there’s no body—and no evidence that Arun ever even existed in the first place.
Paloma is terrified this is all somehow tangled up in the desperate actions she took to escape Sri Lanka so many years ago. Did Paloma’s secret die with Arun or is she now in greater danger than ever before?
CHAPTER 15
SAN FRANCISCO, CA
I was outside my apartment building, but I couldn’t bring myself to go in. She was suddenly everywhere—the woman who brushed past me in a hurry, the man whistling something as he walked by, scrolling on his phone. It wasn’t the same song. It couldn’t be. But I could feel her, like a spiderweb I had walked into, clinging to my skin, refusing to be brushed off, strangling me.
Inhale, Paloma.
It isn’t real. None of this is real.
Just go inside and get your things. You can do this. You’ve escaped her before, you can do it again.
And so, even though it felt like I was moving in slow motion, even though my legs felt heavy and my chest hurt when I took a deep breath, I put one foot in front of the other and made my way inside.
There was one thing that drove me forward—one thing more important than my toothbrush or clean clothes or my laptop or fresh packs of lacy underwear. And that’s my mail.
My mailbox was on the ground floor, and that was the first step. I just had to make it there first.
And I was in luck.
I had the usual supermarket deals and cheap Wi-Fi promotions, but nestled in the middle of them was a lifeline. A rectangular card bearing the photograph of a leopard. I couldn’t tell if it was Mom or Dad who had written this one. The writing had gotten smudged, but I could still make out Love to our sweet girl! I felt lighter as I tucked the postcard into the pocket of my hoodie. I swear sometimes these postcards were the only thing keeping me going.
I took the stairs up. It took longer, but it gave me more time to prepare myself. The stairwell was pretty dark, so I turned on the flashlight on my phone and tried my best not to think about the last time I was there. It smelled like a fucking porta potty in here, so that did a pretty good job of distracting me. Silver goddamned linings.
My hands shook as I unlocked the door, but once I got inside, it was all business. I wasn’t good at many things, but one thing I managed to excel at was shutting my mind down and focusing on whatever the fuck needed to get done.
I turned on all the lights and strode over to the curtains in the living room, tugging them open.
Bathed in light, my apartment revealed itself to be exactly what it was—small, overpriced, clean, and devoid of any fucking demons unless you counted the bitch in the apartment next door.
I glanced at my empty kitchen, just once, to make sure, and then kept my back firmly turned away from it. There was no blood anywhere, not even where I touched the wall on my way to the bathroom. Did blood clean away from wall paint so easily? I know that baking soda usually does the trick, but I’d have to google it later.
Grabbing a large duffel bag from the hallway closet, I went into my room and started to pack.
I wasn’t like my mom. I never coordinated outfits into color-coded packing cubes and used those ridiculous miniature plastic bottles for my toiletries that would barely last one shower, let alone an entire trip, but even Mom would have a meltdown if she saw the way I yanked random pieces of clothing out from various corners of my room and stuffed them in my bag. Tank tops, sweaters, an extra pair of jeans. Thank god my homeless-person vibe didn’t take much coordination.
A cold breeze found its way into the room.
I must have left my window open the last time I was here, because hydrangea petals from Mrs. Jenson’s balcony upstairs swept over my comforter. I stuck my head out the window and peered up. Her caretaker sometimes came out to the fire escape to have a smoke. I wonder if she saw anything that night.
But the fire escape was empty, and I shut the window, making sure it was latched.
I grabbed some new packages of underwear, my laptop, camera, and the notebook where I wrote down my client requests—the last one wanted me wearing cotton panties, size small, preferably with a heart or bow print on them, with ribbons at the waist. And he made it very, very clear that I had to be hairless when wearing them. He didn’t want a Polaroid.
I rolled my eyes just thinking about it. This thinly veiled pedo’s request wasn’t even the creepiest one I’d got. The world was full of sick assholes, and here I was, afraid of a ghost from when I was twelve years old.
Que sera, sera
Whatever will be, will be
I couldn’t help the words drifting into my mind much more than I could stop the memory of her wrapping her fingers around my neck, breathing into my ear. Arun’s empty eyes staring right past me as blood continued to leak down the back of his skull.
Breathe, Paloma. None of this shit is real.
I kept a bottle of Captain Morgan hidden under the sink for emergencies. It was emptier than I remembered, but hey, if being in an apartment where you saw your dead roommate wasn’t an emergency, I don’t know what was.
I took a little swig and nudged open Arun’s bedroom door. I hadn’t been inside since he moved in, not even when the police went in to check if he was in there, so I had no way of knowing whether anything was out of place.
The room was empty. Not just empty of a person. Empty of everything. The stripped-down mattress that came with the ratty box bed stood near the radiator, but there was nothing else. No clothes, no bedsheets, not a thing to suggest that an actual human being, let alone an extorting asshole, had lived here for a couple of months except for the stale smell of Axe aftershave that lingered on the cheap carpet.
What the actual hell? Did the police take his things as evidence or something? But they wouldn’t do that, would they?
No wonder Officer Keller thought I was batshit crazy. It didn’t look like Arun existed at all.
The closet was empty. I got on my knees and looked under the bed. I don’t know what I was expecting—a box, perhaps, or a file full of secrets. A USB drive full of clues. I guess I’d been watching too much TV.
Just dust bunnies. Not even a stray sock. Nothing, absolutely not a fucking thing to suggest that I had a roommate to begin with.
But I did have a roommate.
He found out my secret and blackmailed me. And then he died.
I took another sip of Captain Morgan to steady myself.
I just wish there was a way I could retrace my steps that night. Or at least see if anyone else entered my apartment.
Hang on.
There was something. A speck of dust floating just out of my reach.
It was something Officer Keller had said.
We didn’t see anything on your building’s CCTV footage to sug‑ gest suspicious activity.
I stood right up and set down my bottle. CCTV footage. Of course. I was such a fucking idiot for not thinking of this sooner. I mean, how the hell would Officer Keller know who was suspicious and who wasn’t? The moron could barely comprehend what I was telling him.
Excerpted from MY SWEET GIRL by Amanda Jayatissa, published by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Amanda Jayatissa
