One impulsive decision changes the lives of two lifelong friends forever in a powerful novel of suspense by the USA Today bestselling author of The Last Caretaker.
From the Publisher: “Lark and Mikki know there’s more to life than working night shift at the highway travel stop, going nowhere fast. They live by 2 rules: 1) Say yes to anything, 2) Keep your eyes open for a ride out. Until a stranger drops in heading to a wedding in Florida, and Mikki impulsively agrees to be his plus-one, never to be seen again.
8 years later, Lark is finally getting her life back together for the sake of her young daughter and Mikki’s lovably prickly grandma, who can no longer care for herself. People have almost stopped blaming Lark for Mikki’s disappearance, and she’s engaged to the nicest guy on highway patrol. But when the stranger who drove Mikki away reappears, impossibly looking for her, nobody knows what to believe.
As the search reignites, Lark fights to find out whether Mikki is really missing or doesn’t want to be found. But piecing together the chain of events set into motion that fateful night could threaten everything—and everyone—Lark has left…”
More info About the Author: Jessica Strawser is the USA Today bestselling author of The Last Caretaker, The Next Thing You Know, A Million Reasons Why, Forget You Know Me, Not That I Could Tell (a Book of the Month selection), and Almost Missed You. She was editorial director at Writer’s Digest for nearly a decade before becoming a novelist. Jessica is also a Career Authors contributing editor, popular speaker at writing conferences across the US, and freelance editor and writer with bylines in the New York Times Modern Love column, Publishers Weekly, and other venues. A Pittsburgh native and Outstanding Senior alum of the top-ranked E. W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, she lives with her husband and two children in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she served as 2019 Writer-in-Residence for the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library and received a 2024 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. For more information, visit www.jessicastrawser.com.
Author Site Don’t miss out: Penguin Bookshop will be hosting an evening with Jessica Strawser on Monday, October 21st at 7pm!
Event Info “Strawser increases tension by telling both stories propulsively, leading readers hanging from one chapter to the next… Readers will flock to this fresh take on the missing-girl trope.” ―Booklist (starred review)
“Where did Mikki go? That’s the central question of this tightly plotted psychological suspense. Jessica Strawser deftly explores female friendships, the ties that bind you to the place you’re from, and the things that can pull you away from everything―and everyone―you know. Along with trying to solve the mystery at the heart of this fantastic read, I found myself wondering whether I’d make the same choices, which is what all the best novels do. Pick this one up. You won’t regret it.” ―Catherine Mack, USA Today bestselling author of Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies
“A powerful story about the bonds of friendships and the lengths we’d go to protect the people we love, Catch You Later is full of emotion and nail-biting suspense, propelling you to keep turning pages until the very last word.” ―Lyn Liao Butler, Amazon bestselling author of Someone Else’s Life
“Jessica Strawser has written some great books, but Catch You Later is her best one yet. A powerful and suspenseful story of the way a young person’s snap decision reverberates through the years―and a haunting meditation on lost youth, roads taken and not taken, and the enduring bonds that tie us all together. Tell your friends, your family, and your book club to put this one on the top of the TBR pile!” ―David Bell, New York Times bestselling author of She’s Gone and Storm Warning
“Wish fulfillment has never been more intriguing when a small-town girl is swept away by a beguiling stranger, never to return. Strawser will make you ravenous to know what happened in this absorbing tale of friendship, adventure, love, and loss. Sinister, heartbreaking, and masterfully told, Catch You Later will stay with you long after you put it down.” ―Susan Walter, bestselling author of Good as Dead and Running Cold
“Jessica Strawser’s Catch You Later is exactly the kind of smart, twisty, heartbreaking, and ultimately satisfying novel that I love; a book with totally relatable characters which raises so many questions I knew within the first pages that I was going to devour every word until I reached the end. Don’t think you can guess where the story is going; just put yourself in Strawser’s capable hands and enjoy the ride!” ―Karen Dionne, author of the #1 international bestseller The Marsh King’s Daughter and The Wicked Sister
“My favorite Jessica Strawser novel yet, Catch You Later kept me off-balance and loving it for the entire read. Every time I thought I knew where we were going, the story took a thrilling new turn…This book was one of the best road trips I’ve ever been on!” ―Suzy Krause, bestselling author of Sorry I Missed You
“Hypnotic, elegant, and beguiling, Catch You Later is a beautifully written story about the power of female friendships. There’s a compelling mystery, emotional depth, and tightly plotted twists, but where this book really shines is its characters…Smart, textured, and with a dark, atmospheric heart.” ―Christina McDonald, USA Today and Amazon Charts bestselling author
Chapter 1
Mikki, October 2016
The thing about living near the interstate was, it never let you forget where you were.
Highway noise was a constant background thrum. Louder at night, when you most wanted quiet. Louder in the barren landscape of winter, when you most wanted to migrate someplace warm and peaceful. You could seal yourself inside, muffle all that mechanized rumbling, but the only way to drown it out was with more noise: the tv, a fan, music, headphones. Most people said they got used to it, didn’t even notice it anymore, but Mikki found it maddening to have silence out of reach. She’d catch herself standing at the windows of the tiny apartment she shared with Lark, glaring at the endless stream of headlights in the distance, just as she was now.
To her, the thrum wasn’t so much a nuisance as a reminder.
When the biggest thing your town had going for it was the interstate, you couldn’t help but feel like you should be on your way somewhere.
Everyone else was.
“Catch,” Lark called, and Mikki turned just in time to grab the apron Lark had tossed her way. Lark was already wearing hers. When they first started working the night shift at the travel stop together, after high school, it seemed like a great coup. The shift began after the owner’s preferred workday of 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. So, they slept as late as they wanted, clocked in after
dinner, and got off at three a.m.—which often equated to getting paid to stay out all night flirting and goofing around. They played by their own rules and had only two: 1) Say yes as much as possible, and 2) Keep your eyes open for a ride out of Becksville.
It was fun for a while: Stripping down to swim in the moonlight, watching sunrises from rooftops, mildly trespassing in mildly interesting places—abandoned buildings, new construction, sites that were reportedly haunted or storied or cursed. Their rules were no secret, which meant people liked to push them. Test them. And why not? When nothing else passed for excitement, might as well create your own. In a city, Lark Nichols and Mikki Jensen might not have stood out, but here they joked about passing for small town pretty. And if you were under the impression they were down for a good time, up for anything, well, you were in luck—and so were they. They never hurt anyone and most of the time managed not to get hurt back.
There was only one problem: Staring down their thirtieth birthdays, they were still here.
And they were really stuck now.
ark smoothed the apron over her midsection. “How long, do you think, before anyone starts to notice?” she asked.
“Oh, months.” Mikki said with more confidence than was warranted. She was no stranger to the anxiety of peeing on a test stick and holding her breath, hoping for a negative line to appear. And she’d babysat lots of infants over the years, growing up in a town where no one could afford maternity leave. But she was foggy on the specifics of the nine months between a non-negative test and the swaddled bundle toted home from the hospital.
That was about to change. Everything that happened to Lark also happened to Mikki, and vice versa. Mikki had never resented it before—in fact, she’d long considered her best friend the only thing she had going for her—so she figured she didn’t have a right to start resenting her now. This time next year, Lark would be a single mom, though she wanted to keep that news between them for a long as possible. And Mikki would be…
Well, she’d be here. Same as always, only different. Because she’d have to do the one thing she had never once done, not even during the worst moment of her worst day.
She’d have to resign herself to staying put.
“Nini will notice soon,” Lark said. “She notices everything.”
Mikki’s grandmother, Nini, had been practicing her whole life to embrace the role of cranky old lady. As far back as anyone could remember, she’d been flat-out mean, but now that she’d progressed in years, people laughed her off instead of getting bent. Apparently, she’d earned some unspoken seniority to do as she pleased and come across as endearing.
Of course, when she was the only family you had, it was less so.
“Would you go to Nini for any kind of life advice?” Mikki asked, gesturing in the general direction of Nini’s house down the street. Formerly Mikki’s mother’s house. Not that it had actually belonged to any of them. It was a miracle they had yet to be evicted.
“Life advice from Nini? Hard no.” Lark shuddered.
“Then she’s not someone you should ever take criticism from.”
Lark pulled back and looked at Mikki with admiration. “That’s good. You could start a line of bumper stickers with that one.” Lark was always telling Mikki to put things she said on bumper stickers. Like that was the million-dollar idea that would save them.
“And give up all this?” Mikki gestured around their living room slash kitchen, stifling in the freak autumn heatwave. From the side window, their catawampus air conditioner splashed a stream of condensation onto the peeling vinyl floor, and Lark laughed. No matter hard they tried to perk up the room—painting each wall a different color, combing yard sales for cute castoffs—it still looked like an uninspired space over a garage unintended for habitation. Because that’s what it was.
“If only we had an in with someplace a lot of drivers came through,” Lark mused.
When she joked about the travel stop this way, it never sounded like a stretch. Which was how Mikki had always known Lark was more content there than she let on.
“Speaking of,” Mikki said. “Pete’s on the rampage about being on time. You ready?”
“Ready.” Lark pointed at Mikki’s phone on the end table on her way out the door. Mikki had plenty of messages waiting, but none she felt like responding to. Nini had been barraging her with excuses to postpone her neurology screen, as she did every six months, because Nini hated her specialist as much as she hated the hourlong drive to his office, the closest one they could find. Meanwhile, Mikki’s on-again-off-again boyfriend was in an “on” mood while Mikki was firmly in the off position. And Pete was nagging her to “just think about” switching to the early shift, which she’d already told him was the only thing sadder than the late shift. Worse, when she hinted that the only switch she was interested in was to manager, Pete had texted, I think that’s more Lark’s speed. When she’d asked what that was supposed to mean, he said Mikki was the obvious choice today, but Lark seemed more likely to stick around for the long haul. Like it wasn’t backward to tell someone she was “too good” to get a leg up.
All of which was why Mikki strode purposefully, stubbornly, even joyfully past her phone. “You’re the only person I want to talk to,” she called after Lark, “and you’re with me.”
Mikki would play it back later, wondering what if. Of all the unforgettable moments ahead on this night—and the days that would follow—she’d think about this one quite a lot.
But not half as much as Lark would.
This excerpt is published here courtesy of the author and should not be reprinted without permission.
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