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  Praise for

  No One Ever Asked

  “Humble. Powerful. Awakening. No One Ever Asked unapologetically invites its reader into a journey of historical significance and soul discovery. A trek which, once taken, you won’t come back from.”

  —MARY WEBER, author of The Evaporation of Sofi Snow

  “Emotionally resonant and brimming with hope, No One Ever Asked is an intimate portrayal of a community in chaos. As Katie Ganshert employs alternating perspectives and vastly different viewpoints, she dives deep into fraught themes of race, adoption, social justice, infidelity, friendship, and more. This gripping story is written with sensitivity and grace, and it will stay with readers long after the final page is turned. A heart-changing, transformative work!”

  —NICOLE BAART, author of Little Broken Things

  “No One Ever Asked is that rare breed of story that lingers in your heart and mind long after the final page is turned. Gut wrenching and achingly authentic, this story lays bare the profound intricacies of racial tension. Katie Ganshert is a gifted wordsmith with an uncanny ability to elicit the emotions her characters are experiencing in the reader. This evocative and incisive human drama will not leave you unmoved—a cautionary tale infused with hope. With a handful of stellar novels already to her credit, Ganshert has raised the bar once again. No One Ever Asked has my highest recommendation.”

  —REL MOLLET, relzreviewz.com

  Praise for

  Life After

  “Katie Ganshert is a skilled writer who wrestles earnestly with the clashing forces of faith and fear. Life After will hook you on the first page.”

  —LISA WINGATE, New York Times best-selling author of Before We Were Yours

  “Ganshert uses masterful pacing, engaging characters, and believable dialogue to bring readers along…tackling big issues powerfully.”

  —Publishers Weekly Starred Review

  “Another emotionally gripping page-turner from Katie Ganshert, a novelist who consistently writes with honesty and insight. Life After plumbs the depths of all that gives our existence meaning. Well done.”

  —SUSAN MEISSNER, award-winning author of Secrets of a Charmed Life

  “Katie Ganshert has made her mark by writing compelling stories about resiliency and faith. In her latest, she draws us through the aftermath of trauma, examining the soul’s miraculous ability to not just survive but to thrive—even in the wake of tremendous suffering. The result is an emotional journey that prompts us to question the greater purpose behind every moment we are given.”

  —JULIE CANTRELL, New York Times and USA Today best-selling author of The Feathered Bone

  BOOKS BY KATIE GANSHERT

  The Art of Losing Yourself

  A Broken Kind of Beautiful

  Wishing on Willows

  Wildflowers from Winter

  Life After

  NO ONE EVER ASKED

  Scripture quotations and paraphrases are taken from the following versions: Holy Bible, English Standard Version, ESV® Text Edition® (2016), copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. All rights reserved. Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

  Although the plot of this book is inspired by recent events, the characters and their experiences are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons is coincidental.

  Trade Paperback ISBN 9781601429049

  Ebook ISBN 9781601429056

  Copyright © 2018 by Katie Ganshert

  Cover design by Mark D. Ford

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published in the United States by WaterBrook, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  WATERBROOK® and its deer colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ganshert, Katie, author.

  Title: No one ever asked : a novel / Katie Ganshert.

  Description: Colorado Springs : WaterBrook, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017048918| ISBN 9781601429049 (softcover) | ISBN 9781601429056 (electronic)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Christian / Romance. | FICTION / Sagas.

  Classification: LCC PS3607.A56 N66 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017048918

  v5.2

  a

  * * *

  For my daughter.

  You have made my world so much bigger.

  Contents

  Cover

  Books by Katie Ganshert

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part II

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Part III

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Chapter Fifty-eight
>
  Chapter Fifty-nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-one

  Chapter Sixty-two

  Chapter Sixty-three

  Chapter Sixty-four

  Chapter Sixty-five

  Chapter Sixty-six

  Chapter Sixty-seven

  Chapter Sixty-eight

  Chapter Sixty-nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-one

  Chapter Seventy-two

  Chapter Seventy-three

  Chapter Seventy-four

  Author’s Note

  Readers Guide

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  The world is wrong. You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard.

  CLAUDIA RANKINE

  Brown v. Board of Education

  On May 17, 1954, the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which legalized state-sponsored segregation, was overturned. In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court stated that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal.

  At the turn of the twenty-first century, education for black students was more segregated than in 1968.

  Prologue

  An earthquake started it. The one in Haiti back in 2010. All those images in the media afterward had done their job. Entire buildings not just toppled but flattened like sandcastles at high tide. Lifeless bodies left in the rubble. Small, brown children, streaked with blood, covered in ash. A cross left standing in front of a ravaged church building, and upon it a white Jesus, arms splayed wide in an offer of salvation.

  Camille Gray had stared at that particular image the longest. She was not a woman of passivity. When she was moved, she was moved to action. And so—though she had never been to Haiti herself—she rolled up her sleeves, gathered a team of volunteers, and five months later gave the town of Crystal Ridge its very own, citywide 5K. The media around the event produced pictures in sharp contrast to the ones that inspired the run.

  Bright-eyed children sporting Hope for Haiti T-shirts and wide, happy smiles. Adults of varying shapes and sizes, some who had trained and others who more obviously hadn’t, pinning race bibs to their fronts. A giant banner at the finish line on Morton Avenue, right in front of the Pickle Pie Deli. Water tents and food carts and a live band and an ambulance on standby, just in case.

  That year’s 5K raised twenty thousand dollars and left Camille with the euphoric feeling that came after a job well done.

  It was obvious to everyone. The race must continue.

  The following year, with the Haiti earthquake long since gone from the news, the people of Crystal Ridge ran for Crystal Ridge. Camille—a long-standing PTA mom—gathered together other PTA moms and decided the money would be split among the seven schools that made up Missouri’s highest-ranking district. Thus creating the Crystal Ridge Memorial Day 5K, an event the town looked forward to with increasing anticipation every year.

  Everyone, that is, but Juanita Fine.

  Friends and family called her Nita and often joked at the irony of her surname, as Nita was never actually fine with anything. Least of all, hordes of people standing on her front lawn, unfolding lawn chairs on the curb and cheering on people who were running to raise money for a school district that seemed to have plenty.

  Juanita lived in the only house that remained in the city’s business district. It had been her father’s house before her and his father’s house before him, and she saw no reason to surrender it to developers. Sometimes she suspected the town’s annual race was nothing more than subterfuge—a plot to chase her away—because her two-story brick home sat on Morton and Main, with a grocery store on the left and a law office on the right. And every year, that law office was one of the race’s biggest sponsors. Which meant every year there was loud music playing outside her home and a slew of volunteers handing out water and cheering the runners along as they stampeded across her grass. And every year she made a phone call to the local police department to file a complaint.

  Last time, she spent twenty-seven minutes telling a female police operator that Chewbacca had ruined her rosebushes.

  Chewbacca.

  That was another thing. The runners dressed in costumes.

  This year the Crystal Ridge Police Department had finally provided Nita with a stack of bright orange cones, to which she fastened signs that read in bold lettering: Stay Off the Lawn!

  She had planned to sit on her front porch swing and wave her cane at anyone who dared defy those signs, except this year there was a twist. Not only were there adults in costume, but great plumes of pink powder polluted the air, forcing her and her asthmatic lungs inside to watch from the window, rapping the pane whenever any of the onlookers toed her property line.

  Most of them ignored her.

  So she watched, increasingly irate, as volunteers along two oblong tables snagged plastic bottle after plastic bottle, squeezing their contents into the air, creating bright cotton-candy puffs that rained down like fairy dust. Just beyond them were the water pistols. Young folk wearing headbands brandished them like proud soldiers as they shot streams of pink water at the runners. And just beyond them, the Crystal Ridge marching band—banging their drums as they marched in formation. Thankfully, away from her.

  At 4:22 p.m., a cluster of racers approached, each one wearing a rainbow-colored tutu. Even the boys. In fact, two of them—full grown, large-bodied boys—wore leotards. They were out of their minds. All of them.

  Nita scowled as a spray of pink hit her driveway.

  Enough was enough.

  She pushed open her front door, let in the cacophony of sound, placed her hands on her hips, and glared with the full force of her disapproval, as if doing so could make all of them stop. But nobody did. Nobody noticed her at all. The tutu-wearing runners kept running. The volunteers continued tossing clouds of pink into the sky. The marching band kept marching farther away.

  But then the minute hand changed from 4:22 to 4:23, and something happened nobody could possibly ignore. Something happened that had never happened in the town of Crystal Ridge before, at least not that Juanita Fine could remember. Something that had been brewing ever since that horrible town meeting last July.

  A startling crack burst through the noise like a car backfiring. For a split second, in the infinitesimal span between the sound and the processing of it, Nita thought one had.

  Until it happened again.

  The crowd scattered. Onlookers trampled her cones. Tables upended. Bottles of pink cornstarch flattened underfoot like sandcastles at high tide. And through all the chaos, a blood-curdling, terrifying scream rose above the others.

  One that went on and on and on.

  Even after everyone was gone and all that remained was yellow police tape and a bright crimson stain on her green grass, Juanita Fine could still hear it.

  Newton’s First Law: Objects in motion stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an external force.

  One

  Before

  Wipers squeaked against the windshield, smearing raindrops across the glass. The rhythmic sound filled the car as Anaya Jones idled in the driveway. Her hands trembled like her great-grandfather’s. Even though he died when she was in first grade, she would always remember the exaggerated way they shook at the dinner table whenever he used silverware.

  She turned the key, and the wipers stopped at a thirty-degree angle. All that could be heard was the pitter-patter of rain as she sat behind the steering wheel. A satchel lay open on the passenger seat—the new one her mother gave her before her first day of student teaching. The flap was open, revealing a corner of the science curriculum manual stuffed inside and a
sparkly picture a student had given her from art class. Silver glitter would probably speckle the bottom of her satchel in the weeks to come. It wouldn’t go away. And neither would this.

  The shaking in her hands moved into her arms.

  Anaya picked up the satchel, removed the half-empty cup of cold gas-station coffee from the cup holder, and stepped out into the cool rain. The screen door squealed on its hinges as she pulled it open. It took a good three tries before she could manage the lock.

  Inside, the house was quiet.

  It still smelled like last night’s dinner.

  Auntie Trill slept on the sagging couch, four-year-old Abeo wedged between her and the backrest, tracking Anaya’s movements with wide-awake eyes. Her uncoordinated attempts with the house key must have woken him.

  She placed her finger to her lips and tiptoed past him into her room, where she set the coffee and the satchel on her desk and pulled a men’s sweatshirt over her head. She sat on the edge of the bed—her body like wet cement as she pressed the sleeve to her nose and inhaled an achingly familiar scent—one that would forever be associated with regret.