SarahCarpenter's latest novel; the launch party occurred at the start of WordsWillNeverHurtMe.
Summary
Peter leaves Jessica at the altar - after a page or two it turns out that she's actually narrating this in a bar, still wearing her wedding dress. She then leaves town and goes to live with her mother in the country. Winter is drawing in, and there isn't much to do aside from sit inside and talk. After a little while, even this drops off, and they lapse into a perpetual silence, with the mother knitting and the daughter reading.
One evening, they get a visitor after dark. Jessica's mother answers the door, has a brief conversation, then the visitor leaves. Jessica asks, but her mother won't tell her who it was. The following day, she denies it ever happened. A short time afterwards, Jessica falls ill. Her mother is particularly attentive, bringing her soup and such.
As time wears on, and Jessica doesn't get any better (in fact, she gets weaker), she notices that her mother is becoming more grudging in her nursing. Moreover, she thinks she hers her talking to someone outside the room. Whenever she tries to get up and investigate, her mother hears, and comes and puts her back into bed, dismissing the suggestion that anyone else is there.
One day, whilst he mother is out, she gets up and goes into the sitting room, to find the place festooned with occult symbols. She becomes dizzy and faints. When she comes round, her mother is dabbing her forehead with a wet cloth. She is on the floor in the sitting room, where she fell, but all the occultness is gone.
She becomes increasingly paranoid, and comes to believe that her mother is poisoning her food. She takes to disposing of it, and getting her own food when her mother is out. This seems to work; she feels a lot stronger. She hides this from her mother, and, when she feels up to it, sneaks into the sitting room one night and uses a statuette to brain her mother while she sits in her chair.
She wakes the next day feeling far better, and wanders into the living room, where she finds the corpse. The murder comes back to her mind, and she rants and screams at the corpse, then, when she's calmed down, she drags the corpse outside and buries it, and the statue, struggling as the earth is frozen. While doing this, she thinks she sees a figure watching he in the distance.
She bolts into the house, and begins to blockade it with everything to hadn - dressers, tables, whatever. To block the window in the bedroom, she hauls her mattress off the bed - revealing the occult drawings. She is pawing through these, trying to figure out how they got there, when she sees someone looking in through the window. She rushes to investigate, but sees only her own reflection against the darkening skies.