Chapter Eleven
Annabelle
How to explain this to Chase?
To Chase, for whom every mention of Anna Winters was like picking at an open wound. His resentment and anger were so clear, and he had a right to them. I might have felt the same way. But the Anna in his mind wasn't the Anna I knew. The Anna I still missed.
"She died when I was nine," I said. "But I was there a lot. And she…"
I stopped, tipping my head back to stare at the ceiling as if the right words would appear somewhere among the exposed pipes and beams.
"She loved her kids so much. She worked a lot.
She was a doctor and that doesn't generally lead to a light schedule.
She wasn't just a doctor, she was a surgeon.
On-call, long hours. And even as a little kid, I knew that as much as she loved her job, and she did love it, she felt guilty because it meant she was away from her children.
Away from her family. I remember one night—"
My throat closed, and tears pooled in my eyes. She'd been gone for so long, but Anna Winters had been a constant in my life, almost a second mother, and her loss at such a young age had hit me hard. She'd been vibrant, full of life, and then she was gone.
Chase's eyes went wide with alarm and he said, "Hey, hey, Annabelle, we don't have to talk about this. I didn't come here to make you sad."
"I want you to know, though. I don't think she ever forgot about you.
She was late one night when I was there for a sleepover, and she missed putting Lise to bed.
She never liked to miss putting her kids to bed.
It was a thing with her. She would move heaven and earth to be home to tuck in her babies.
And if she got called in to the hospital and couldn't do it…
I was only a kid, but I could tell she hated it.
She hated that part of her job. Maybe when she got into the hospital and scrubbed in for surgery she forgot about that and focused on how much she loved what she did.
“But in those moments when she was getting ready to leave the house, I could see it in her.
As a kid, I didn't really get it. But Lise and I talked about it when we were older.
It made Lise a little cautious about the idea of ambition.
About wanting a career in the single-minded way her mother had because Lise remembered the price Anna paid for it. The guilt that ate at her. But now—"
I stopped as Chase shoved a letter into my hands. Anna's letter. Chase got up, setting the wooden box on the futon beside me and paced to the windows that looked down on Highland Avenue.
Slowly, not sure I was ready to see what was inside, I pulled the folded paper out of the envelope to see Anna's flowing, messy script. She'd been so young when she'd written this, young and facing a decision that had no right answer.
Hot tears streamed down my face at this glimpse inside the mind of a woman I'd loved, but only known as a child knows an adult, never as a grown woman.
In seeing this, seeing the decision that haunted her, so much made sense. Those nights I'd wake to find her sitting beside Lise's bed, stroking her daughter's hair off her face and watching her sleep with love and pain in her eyes.
Had she been looking at Lise and thinking of the child she'd given up? Doubting, and wishing she’d done it differently? Reading this letter, I knew her decision never sat easily, no matter how many years went by.
I refolded the letter and slid it back into its envelope, wiping away the tears on my cheeks with the back of my hands. My voice cracked when I spoke.
"She knew she'd regret it. She was right. She would have regretted it either way. It was different back then, you know. There weren't as many women pursuing a medical degree, for one. Med school would have been hard enough.
“I don't know that Annalise's grandparents would have disowned James.
Honestly, it seems unlikely, but I never knew them.
I always heard they were a lot more hard-line than Hugh and Olivia or James and Anna, so maybe her guess was right.
And if James had been kicked out of the family business…
He loved that company like Aiden and Gage do.
It would have killed him. I'm not saying what she did was right—"
"Does it even matter anymore?" Chase shot out, with more than a trace of bitterness.
"Was there really a right or wrong? She had me," he said, shrugging both shoulders and shoving his hands in his pockets.
"She gave me life and then she gave me to a family she thought would take good care of me.
Who did take good care of me. I'm not judging her. "
"For someone who isn't judging, you seem pretty pissed off," I said neutrally. He had a right to be pissed. He had a right to feel however he wanted to feel. But Anna had done the best she could.
Chase let out a long breath and sank onto the futon beside me.
"I am," he admitted. "And it's so fucking stupid, Annabelle.
I don't have anything to be mad about. She made her choice, and in a lot of ways, it was a good one.
She made sure I would have a good life and she wasn't sure she could give me that.
Knowing what we know now about William Davis it's possible she kept me safe by giving me away.
We'll never know what he would have done if she'd come home with me and married James. Obviously, he was unhinged…"
I hadn't even put that part of it together, and at the thought of William Davis—that stodgy, parental stand-in who'd hidden a monster beneath his bland facade—thinking about that man close to a defenseless infant who was in his way? I didn't want to consider what he might have done.
"Oh God, good point," I said. "Did those letters say anything about William?"
"No. Nothing. Not really. James mentioned in the beginning that William wasn't taking the breakup well. After that, nothing else. But Vance gave me this."
He looked at the wooden box beside him. Picking it up, he handed it to me. The wood was cool and silky beneath my fingertips, the box lighter than I expected.
"Is this what I think it is?" I asked.
"If you think it's the box William Davis broke into Winters House to get and left behind when he almost got caught, then yes."
"So, these are William's letters to Anna," I said, looking at the box as if it were filled with roaches and poisonous spiders. I didn't have to read the letters to know their contents would be toxic.
"Exactly," Chase said grimly.
"Have you looked inside yet?"
"No. I couldn't. I came downstairs and I gave them the box with James' letters and the pictures of Anna. It was sad, but it was filled with so much love. Those pictures and letters were all about love. And then Vance gave me this—this box of poison—and I just—"
He let out another gust of air as if his ribs squeezed too tightly on his lungs. "I just left. I couldn't stay there and look at these. Their parents died because of him. And his blood is in my veins. He’s a part of me. I wouldn't be alive if—"
"Stop," I shot out, grabbing his hand and shaking it hard, jerking him out of his thoughts.
He looked up to meet my eyes. "Stop, Chase.
Just because he was a part of the process that gave you life does not mean that he has anything to do with you.
From everything I know, William Davis came from two perfectly normal, perfectly nice people.
He has a brother and a sister around here somewhere and neither of them are crazy.
Sometimes people go wrong. It doesn't mean it has anything to do with you. "
"Annabelle, you know that's bullshit. Sometimes this stuff is genetic."
I squeezed his fingers tighter and shook his arm again. "And most of the time it's not. I'll agree, there must've been something wrong in William Davis' brain. You don't get that unhinged…"
I looked at the floor between my feet. It had been less than three months since William Davis had almost killed Annalise. The fear and pain—the shock—were still raw.
"I don't know how you get that deranged," I said.
"The way he went after Lise was fucked up.
So, yeah, I'll agree there was something wrong with him, but we have no idea if it was genetic.
And by now, don't you think you’d know? It's not like you're a little kid.
If you were going to be a sociopath, I'm pretty sure we'd have seen the signs by now. "
Chase appeared to think that over. I'd only known him for two weeks.
Maybe he was a sociopath. I wasn't an expert on deranged minds, but I was sure most sociopaths knew how to hide their crazy.
William Davis had been particularly good at it.
But William Davis had always left me cold.
The way he looked at me as if I were a bug, suitable only for being squashed beneath his shoe.
Not good enough for the Winters children.
I'd always thought there was something off about him, but I'd assumed it was a normal reaction when someone doesn't like you. I didn't get anything like that from Chase.
I didn't entirely trust my judgment of him as a man. I wasn't good at picking boyfriends. In that context, I was a shit judge of character.
But in general? When it came to friendship? There, my track record was stellar.
Chase was my friend. He was a good guy. He didn't have crazy hiding inside him. I was sure of it.
I looked down at the box on the futon, still unopened. "Are you going to read them?” I asked.
"Do you think I should?"
I didn't have to consider. "No, I don't."
Chase, who'd opened his mouth to interrupt, shut it and stared at me for a second before he took a breath and said, "That's not what I thought you'd say. You strike me as the kind of woman who faces her problems head-on."