Chapter Eleven
Eleven
Two Days Later
If there was one thing that Mary Smith knew right from the start – something she knew even before she was granted the right to an identity change – was that as soon as she was free from that whole court circus, she would be getting the hell out of Woburn.
In fact, Mary was certain that she’d be getting the hell out of Massachusetts too.
All she needed to do was pick a new place to start over, and for that, once again, she decided to follow Oakfield’s advice as best as she could and ‘tip the odds in her favor’.
‘If I were you,’ he had said. ‘I’d place all my belongings in storage and simply rent an already furnished place somewhere.’
Despite being a millionaire, at that exact point in time, Mary Smith had very few belongings of her own.
As soon as her divorce settlement came through, she had instructed her lawyers to liquidate whatever they could, as fast as they could, and since then, they had marketed and sold over ninety-five percent of everything that the court had awarded her.
All that she’d kept for herself were a few wardrobe items, but not many.
Something else that Mary had decided on was that she would completely reinvent herself – from top to bottom.
She would walk, talk, look and dress in a completely different way to Samantha Stewart, and the lack of earthly possessions, at least right then, wasn’t such a bad thing.
It actually meant that Mary was free to move around as much as she wanted to, without needing to put anything into storage.
And for her ‘move around’ phase, she had her own little trick to add to Oakfield’s advice – her own little way of tipping the odds in her favor.
After yet another Internet search, Mary found out that in America, the largest concentration of women whose first name was Mary lived inside what was known as the ‘Bible Belt’ – a very large area of land that included almost all of Southeastern USA, running from Virginia down to Northern Florida, while also stretching west all the way to Oklahoma and part of Texas.
And what better way to hide someone called Mary other than right among thousands of other Mary’s.
With that as her starting point, Mary decided that she would spend the first six months – maybe even the first year of her new life – somewhere inside the ‘Bible Belt’, but there was one problem – the same problem that she faced when deciding where Mary Smith had originally come from: small American towns – and the ones inside the ‘Bible Belt’ – were famous for how everyone tended to stick their noses into everybody else’s business.
They were also famous for people being more concerned with your past than your present: where did you come from?
Why did you decide to move into their town?
How come at your age you’re unmarried with no kids… and so on.
Privacy, or better yet, other people’s privacy, wasn’t something that many folks over in the ‘Bible Belt’ cared too much for.
But as far as Mary was concerned, as long as she kept herself to herself and stuck to a large city – where theoretically, the ‘Belt’ should lose some of its grip – she couldn’t see any real problems. This was only a temporary tactical move anyway – a decoy, just like Oakfield had suggested – and out of all the large cities that sat within the ‘Belt’, one certainly appealed to Mary a lot more than all the others.
A place that she’d always wanted to visit but never really had a chance to – Nashville, Tennessee.
From a very early age, music had been Mary’s safe haven from just about everything – pain, bullying, anxiety, loneliness, anger, betrayal – anything and everything that had ever made her feel sad or distressed.
It had been the one thing she knew she could count on at any time.
All she needed to do was click a button and the notes…
the melody… the harmonies… would whisper comfort directly into her ear.
But music hadn’t only been there for her during sad times.
In fact, for as long as she could remember, music had been the only constant presence in her life – and Nashville wasn’t known as the ‘Music City’ for nothing.
There was no place in the world as legendary as Nashville when it came to country music and live performance venues.
Fine, country music wasn’t exactly Mary’s preferred choice, but she did like some of it, and since the idea was to reinvent herself from top to bottom, why not start with her taste in music?