Chapter Ten
Chase
Ididn't even think about where I was going. I didn't think about anything at all. The wooden box sat on the passenger seat of my car, a ticking bomb I wasn't ready to defuse.
I blanked my mind. I didn't want to think about the Winters family. I didn't want to think about Anna, or James, or William Davis. I had a violent and childlike urge for it all to just go away.
I wished I'd never found the file in my parents' basement. I wished I'd never moved to Atlanta, never forced my path to cross that of the Winters family.
Never discovered who my father was or learned that my mother was more than a name in a gossip column.
I was parallel parking on the street two blocks down from Annabelle's Café when I realized where I was. Who I'd come running to.
My subconscious was a lot sharper than the working part of my brain.
At the thought of seeing Annabelle, the knot in my gut relaxed. She bristled with energy all the time, but it wasn't a nervous energy; it was active and productive. Underneath that buzz was a rock-solid sense of resolve. Of calm.
Annabelle knew enough of the background to make it easier than talking to a stranger, but she wasn't one of them. By her own admission, she was an outsider. I needed to talk to someone who didn't have an agenda, even if that agenda was my happiness.
I felt bad for running out on Vivi, but I knew in my gut that she would try to lead me around to accepting my place in the Winters family. A place I wasn't sure I wanted.
I didn't belong to them. I belonged to myself.
Picking up the box, I cradled it in my arms, awkwardly pulling my keys from my pocket and locking the car door.
The café was hopping. Midmorning on a beautiful Saturday and everyone was out shopping.
Even so, Annabelle glanced up from behind the counter, and the moment her eyes lit on my face she knew.
I don't know how, but she knew something was wrong.
With a word to the barista standing beside her, she stepped back, poked her head in the kitchen, and then she was coming around the counter, walking towards me.
"What happened?" she asked, concern clouding her warm brown eyes.
"I…"
I couldn't blurt it out in the middle of a crowded café.
Annabelle didn't wait. Closing her hand around my arm, she led me down the hall, past the restrooms, past her office, to a door with a deadbolt lock. Pulling a key from her pocket, she opened it and led me up a narrow set of stairs.
At the top, the door opened into a packed storage room. So packed, it took me a moment to realize that it wasn't a storage room, it was a living room. Or it had been.
Turning sideways to weave through the shelves and stacks of supplies, everything from paper cups to gigantic bags of sugar and flour, I followed Annabelle through another doorway into a makeshift studio apartment complete with galley kitchen, what looked like a tiny bathroom, and a futon neatly made with a quilt and pillow.
As if seeing it through my eyes, Annabelle's cheeks flushed. "It's not much. I, well, when I expanded—"
"Is this where you live?" I asked, trying to keep the judgment out of my voice. My freshman year dorm room had resembled a prison cell, and it had been more luxurious than this.
Annabelle's things were stacked in plastic storage containers, haphazardly piled in the corners. She barely had room to move around in here. Her cheeks flushed darker, and she gave a jerky shrug of one shoulder.
"I know, I know. It's ridiculous. But, see, I expanded into the storage room downstairs three years ago, and I had to borrow money to do it.
I don't like that. It makes me nervous. So, instead of getting an apartment, like I probably should have, I turned my living room into the new storage room and I've been camping out here. "
"For three years?" I asked, looking around the tiny, cramped space again.
She'd been living like this for three years? Carefully, not wanting to hurt her feelings, I said, "You look like you do a good business down there. Good enough that you could afford more than this."
"I do. I do a really good business. I didn't have any trouble borrowing the money I needed, honestly. But, like I said, I don't like that. It makes me nervous. I like to own what I have. And I had some financial setbacks a while ago, came close to losing the café and it’s made me overly cautious.
“I want to buy a house. I know I won't be able to do it all with cash, but I was thinking if I could save up enough for a big down payment, I could keep my mortgage small. Then I'd have more money in the long run. I'm getting close."
"That makes sense," I admitted.
Most people weren’t willing to sleep on a futon in a glorified storage room to save money for a down payment on a house, but I wasn't going to give her a hard time for being fiscally responsible. Even if she was taking it to an extreme.
It also answered my question of how much of a life she had outside of work. If this was where she went when she wasn't in the café, the answer was ‘not much of one’. But I'd already suspected that.
"Sit," she commanded, gesturing to the futon across the room.
I did, balancing the wooden box on my knees. I still hadn't opened the thing. I still didn't want to.
Annabelle busied herself in the kitchen making a cup of coffee.
"I didn't mean to interrupt your work," I started to say, but she waved me off.
"I was due a break anyway," she said, "and Grover just came in off of his. He can handle my spot in the front for a while."
"So he showed up today?" Grover was the hipster, man-bunned barista who kept flaking on Annabelle. I'd been too distracted to spot him when I'd come in.
"He was even on time," she said with a little laugh. "I almost passed out from the shock"
I didn't say anything, only pressed my sweaty palms to the satiny surface of the wooden box and stared down at it.
"So, what's in the box?" Annabelle asked, coming to sit beside me and handing me a steaming cup of coffee.
"Have you heard about the search for the secret compartments in Winters House?"
"Amelia and Sophie's project? In the library?"
I nodded.
"I've heard enough. Why? Did you find that?" She started to reach for it, and I tightened my grip on the box.
When her hands dropped I reached in my back pocket and pulled out Anna's letter.
"No. This is the box they found after the break-in.
" I wasn't ready to say William Davis' name.
"I got the bright idea to search the secret library above the dining room.
I found a box of letters and pictures. Almost everything in there was from James to Anna—the letters, I mean—and there were some pictures of her—"
I cut off, suddenly realizing that I had no idea how much of the story Annabelle knew. Sure, she was tight with the Winters family, but inconvenient pregnancies and children given up for adoption weren't necessarily topics of conversation, even among friends.
For a moment I thought I should keep my mouth shut, and then I decided, fuck that. Annabelle was my friend, and this was my story, too. I had the right to talk to a friend if I wanted to. Feeling a shadow of my adolescent belligerence, I took a breath and started to explain.
"I don't know how much of this you know," I said.
"But, apparently, Anna Winters and William Davis had a child when they were in college.
She didn't tell him she was pregnant. She dropped out of college, went home to have the baby, and fell in love with James Winters through letters while she was gone.
She gave the baby up for adoption, came back to school, married James, had a bunch of kids, and pretty much lived a fairytale until—"
I snapped my mouth shut. Annabelle had known Anna Winters. Had loved her. And while I might be resentful and angry, Annabelle still grieved.
"And you were that baby?" she guessed.
"You got there quickly," I said, feeling a little sick. Again, I wished all of this would go away. "Yeah. I'm the baby."
Annabelle didn't say anything. She reached out, prying one of my hands from my grip on the box and taking it in hers with a tight squeeze. All she said was, "Chase."
"How did you know?"
"You look too much like Vance for it to be a coincidence. I didn't know about Anna, though now that I'm thinking about it, it kind of makes sense. But I knew you had to be related to them somehow."
"Why didn't you ask?"
"Not my business," she said.
"How does it make sense? None of this makes sense to me."
I hated the part of me that wanted to understand Anna Winters. I hated the part of me that cared. I could still remember the rage I'd felt when I learned I was adopted, learned the people I thought were my parents had lied to me my entire life.
And then when I dug into the records and discovered that Anna Marlow had ditched me to become Anna Winters, I'd turned all that anger on her.
All that anger, that unhappiness, masked the part of me that was desperate for a piece of the woman who might have been my mother but had chosen not to be.