Excerpt from What Lies Between Us by Nayomi Munaweera, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

There is only one other wedding picture in the house. It sits on my mother's dressing table, and when she sees me looking at it, she says, "I was just a child. Only seventeen. And I had you the next year. You were with us from the very beginning. It was always the three of us." She considers the picture and tells me the story yet again. "Only those two photographs. The photographer went out and got drunk after the wedding. Got in a fight and destroyed his camera. All the rolls were ruined. I cried for a week when they told me. Thank god, at least Aruna Uncle had a camera. Otherwise even these two we wouldn't have."

Beneath the glass of its frame, the photograph still shows off its cobwebbed crinkles. I had been small, maybe four or five. I had awoken in the middle of the night to loud voices. I had slipped out of my narrow bed and gone to stand in the hallway that led to their bedroom. I saw his arm raised and this photograph in its previous frame hurled across the room. Heard the crash of it against the wall. He saw me then. He came to the door, put his finger to his lips. Shh, he was saying, I must be quiet. I must be good and go back to bed. He closed the door.

Later either he or she had taken the picture, unfurled it, and put it in a new frame. It was something I learned then. That you could take the crumpled remains of something destroyed and smooth them into newness. You could pretend certain things weren't happening even when you had seen or felt them. Everything done can be denied.

* * *

Sometimes at twilight she goes out to stand at the line of trees by the river's edge. She watches the dark water flow by her bare feet. I watch from a window. I know my father is watching her from a different window in his study. His hand is curled around a glass of arrack. He will drink for hours and then he will fall asleep in his chair. I have found him there, his head lolling on the student papers, the empty glass dropped from his nerveless fingers onto the floor, making a pungent puddle by his bare feet. I don't wake him. I have done this before and he had looked at me with some terrible warning in his eyes, so now I always let him be.

Now from our separate windows, we watch her. She does not belong to us, but to some other state, some other mood, and even if we called to her, she would ignore us or stare back at the house, past us in the windows as if we did not exist. When the sun drops as suddenly as a shot bird, all we can see are her earrings, jagged lines of silver that dart from the tips of her earlobes to the silhouette of her rounded shoulders. We watch these lightning flashes until they too disappear.

Excerpted from What Lies Between Us by Nayomi Munaweera. Copyright © 2016 by Nayomi Munaweera. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.