Excerpt from I'm the Girl by Courtney Summers, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I didn't know." The thought of her worrying over me is almost too impossible to grasp. I can't believe Cleo Hayes has been calling and Tyler didn't tell me. It's shameful after what she did for me, us—picking me up, getting me to help. If it had been Matthew, I could maybe understand, but Cleo's only crime is being his wife. And I've never thought either of them guilty for what happened with Mom. They were only looking out for what was theirs.

"Is it all right if I sit down?" she asks. "Or would you rather I leave?"

"Stay," I say quickly.

She doesn't belong in this room, in this house, on this side of town, but I watch as she moves around the kitchen with ease, like the mess of this life belongs to her. She turns a chair out at the table and sits, crossing her legs. I trace their slender path up until our eyes meet, and quickly look away, blood rushing to my cheeks.

But she stays looking—at me.

"I keep thinking how ..."

"What?" There's nothing more I want to hear than what she's thinking.

"Matthew and I seem to have a habit of finding you when you need it the most," she says. My heart leaps at this; that she knows that story from so long ago, that he told it to her. And then there's nothing more I want than to hear how it was told. "How are you, Georgia?"

"I didn't know you called," I say again, the revelation sharpening from shame into something else. Hurt.

I can't believe Tyler kept that from me.

"You didn't answer my question."

"I'll be okay."

"It's shocking something like that could happen here. Ashley was ..." Her eyes grow distant as she tries to find the words. "She was thirteen. And he stopped the car after he hit you, is that what I've been hearing? That you got a look at who did it?"

I grimace at these awful details finding their way into Ketchum's collective consciousness without my permission. Imagine the blame of the whole affair somehow landing on me because I'm Katy Avis's girl.

Because if you're Katy Avis's girl, where else would it fall.

I think of Nora's accusing eyes.

"No ... I passed out. When I woke up, my bike was gone, and my phone. There were footprints around me." I clench the fingers of my good hand, disgusted. "All I had to do was look at him, and I couldn't even manage it."

"Maybe that's what saved your life."

"I thought that was you."

She smiles faintly, and we stare at each other, the space between us holding so much unsaid ... the longer I look at her, the less I understand why.

"I was at Aspera." But it sounds like a question.

She inclines her head. "You were. We waited for the ambulance outside the lodge."

"I don't remember it."

"I'm not surprised. You were barely holding on."

"I've always—" My voices catches. "I always wanted to see it."

"Your mother never brought you, did she? Not even for a visit?" she asks. I shake my head. "Maybe I shouldn't say this ... but I'll never understand why she hated us so much."

"I do," I say. "I mean, I think I do."

Cleo leans forward. "Would you tell me?"

I never get to tell anyone what I think about what happened with Mom and Aspera. It's a line Tyler won't let me cross, says there's too much I don't know. But there's things I know that he doesn't. I've gone over it again and again, and I think I'm closer to the truth of it than anyone.

Just because she's dead doesn't mean I'm wrong.

"I think ... it's that she was afraid of her own dreams, and some people, they don't know how to have dreams ... so they decide to live in a reality where they just can't ever come true."

That was my mother: a woman who didn't know how to do the type of work she did in the type of place she did it in and come home to our kind of house and live our kind of life. "It makes them bitter and that bitterness makes them ... well. You know what she did."

Excerpted from I'm the Girl by Courtney Summers. Copyright © 2022 by Courtney Summers. Excerpted by permission of Wednesday Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.