Chapter 11
“And I’m so honored that you all came tonight to share it with me.
” Tessa let the applause wash over her as she finished her speech.
She customized it for every venue, even though no one would come to hear her in two different cities, but she kept the bones the same: who, what, when, where, and a bit of why.
She’d noticed, with delight, the bobbing heads in her audience, and their don’t you love it nudges.
They held their books against their chests, almost hugging them.
“Let’s take a class photo.” Tessa spread her arms to encompass the group. “And if you have the book, hold it up. I’ll post it on social, if you promise to share. Will you?” At the murmur of agreement, Tessa took her phone from the podium, positioned it—then put it down.
“Hey, don’t cover your faces with the book, okay? I want to remember you . I’m saving every one of these.”
The audience became a sea of smiling faces and blue rectangles, and Tessa snapped a few shots. Then put down the phone.
“Now. Shall I read to you? Then take some more questions?” She always gave her audiences a choice.
Olivette worried that if you read the beginning of the book, people would skip it when they held the actual book in their hands.
But Tessa couldn’t read anything from the middle, everything was a clue and a hint and foreshadowing.
The middle was when the book turned darker, and after that grew terrifyingly unsettling.
And that hard-won ending, a surprise even to her.
“Chapter one, pages one and two. Okay?” She paused. “And you read the rest when you buy the book.”
The audience laughed, appreciative. They understood, Tessa hoped, she was honestly acknowledging their participation in her life, accepting that their decisions and actions dictated her future.
“Here we go,” she said, and heard the rustle of pages as her audience opened their books to read along.
She took a breath, then prepared to alter her voice, make it more formal, like her audiobook.
In her reading mind she became Annabelle—thirty-two years old, smart, driven, cagey, ambitious, relentless.
Sexy. Brave. And with so many dark and ugly secrets.
But those wouldn’t be revealed until later in the book.
She wouldn’t read those parts here. “Ready?”
The audience sat, faces upturned, eyes widened in expectation, every one of them nodding. Yes.
The audience listened, rapt, until she read the final lines of page 2: “‘But no one sees Annabelle coming. Not until it’s too late. Now he’s about to have a lesson in the Annabelle rules.’”
She closed the book. Set it on the lectern. “The rest you’ll have to read for yourselves.”
“We already have!” someone called out.
“We love the Annabelle rules!”
Her laughter, genuine, joined with the audience in a common understanding.
Tessa knew the perils of the corporate world; the impossible balance between self-confidence and self-preservation, how difficult it was to stand up for yourself in the face of a system that was designed to perpetuate the old ways, not to grow.
How innovation, even simply questioning, was disdained and dismissed.
Especially if a woman offered it. She didn’t need to remain in the corporate world to recognize that. She just needed to be alive.
“Now, who has a question?” Tessa asked. Every time Tessa had to call on someone for a question, there was a moment, a tiny interstitial moment, carrying the sinister possibility that a stranger in the audience would ask something life-changing. Something probing. Or disturbing.
A woman in the second row stood. “You’ve said you hear Annabelle’s voice. I mean, how does that work?”
“I’m not sure.” Tessa smiled, and soft laughter rippled through the audience. “There’s something mysterious about a writer’s imagination—it still feels surprising to call myself a writer—but I guess this book is proof that I am.”
“You are!” someone called out.
“Well, thank you,” Tessa said. She glanced at store owner Heather Guthrie, who looked as contented as Tessa felt.
A full house at a book signing could assure the week’s profits and keep the store in business.
A precarious and exhausting job , Tessa understood that.
Be good to your independent bookstores, DJ had reminded her. You exist because of them.
“Yes?” She pointed at a mop-haired woman a few rows away from the podium. Her blue earrings sparkled through the curls.
“Does Annabelle’s experience come from anything in your real life? Did you ever make a Faustian bargain like she did?”
Another common question, as if a story could not simply be imagined. Maybe it couldn’t be. But she had prepared her careful answer.
“Well, every novel comes from a writer’s personal experience, and then again, it doesn’t.
I wrote the book when I was pushing forty, because that’s when the time was right.
We need to discover our strengths and come into our power however and whenever it works for us.
Like Annabelle does. And it would be a spoiler to say more, okay? ”
Annabelle’s bargain was definitely not the same as her own, but everyone made bargains, and Tessa was no different.
She thought of it every day, the bargain she’d made so very long ago, and now she was here, and Henry and the kids were home.
Bargains relied on stasis; that once you made a deal, none of the elements of the deal could ever change.
But that was impossible—the infinite opportunities of life ensured no modern Faustian bargain could ever be unbreakable.
Still. Its inevitable and sinister requirements could not be forgotten.
She only hoped they could be avoided.
Tessa pointed to a woman in the back. “Yes?”
“Where did you grow up, and how do you think that affected what you write?”
That question again. She tried not to frown.
Be question-adjacent, Sadie had instructed.
“I grew up in a small town, nothing exciting, not even a bookstore, can you imagine? I lived at the library. How that affected my writing? It made me love stories, the kind that carry you away. The fictional escape books give us can also be an education, can’t it?
It can take us places we never dreamed we could go.
” Tessa pointed to a blue-earringed woman in the front row.
“Thank you for sitting in the front, brave soul,” she said. “Do you have a question?”
“Yes, but exactly where?” The woman in the back had remained standing, her torso now higher than the other attendees’ heads. In jeans, Tessa saw, and a white T-shirt with a navy blazer. “Exactly where did you grow up?”
Some heads had turned to look at the questioner.
Uh-oh, Annabelle said. Watch out.
Heather had edged closer to the podium, and glanced at Tessa, telegraphing you okay?
Tessa nodded. I’m fine . “It’s a privacy thing,” she said. “My family doesn’t like attention, and I try to protect their personal space—everything is so shared these days, isn’t it? I love to share my novel and my philosophy of life, but—”
A sound came from in front of her, the lectern vibrating. Tessa laughed, acknowledging the buzz of her silenced phone, and held it up again. “See? They’re messaging me now,” she joked. “Telling me to go on to the next question.”
The audience laughed in approval, and the woman in the blazer lowered herself into her chair, slowly disappearing behind the heads of the people in front of her.
Tessa glanced at the caller ID.
Henry.
Call me. Linny.