Chapter 39
Now Tessa felt her back get wetter and wetter, the sounds of the spraying shower a white noise behind her, the steam from the too-hot water condensing on the hotel’s fogging mirror.
The chocolates on the bathroom counter taunted her with their telegraphed backstory. Their unsubtle reference to violence.
She picked up the box with two careful fingers, looking underneath. From your flight attendants, it had said. It had said the bookstore told them the name of Tessa’s hotel. But the card was gone.
“Personality is revealed in the choices a character makes”—she remembered an early conversation with her editor, in Olivette’s aerie of a Manhattan office, sunlight glowing through its thirtieth-floor windows, the skyscrapers of the city beyond.
Stacks of books on the floor and double-rowed on the shelves, and a glistening jade plant elegant in one corner, the one bit of green in a room full of paper and pages.
“And I love how you’ve shown us,” Olivette had said, “through Annabelle’s clear motivations, why she does the things she does.
Even if we don’t always agree with them. ”
Olivette had patted Tessa’s printed-out manuscript, almost with affection. “A good book is about causation. Remember that. Something happens because of something else.”
Tessa had nodded, thinking how wise Olivette was, and how she herself had never thought of it that way.
“And the reason that works in a novel,” Olivette had continued, “is because that’s how life works. We make a decision, and as a result, something happens. And then as a result of that, something else happens. And that’s a story.”
“And that’s a story,” Tessa now said it out loud, her back soaked and the chocolates destroyed and her emotions swirling as red and hot as those fire engine lights with the fear that she had done something to deserve this.
That it was causation, exactly as Olivette said.
And until she knew what had caused it and until she knew who had reacted with this insidious chocolate message—a message saying I know where you are, I can get to you, even in a locked hotel room where no one is allowed even to be inside the building, and I can destroy you as easily as a fancy box of candy —she’d never be able to stop it.
In a novel, her tormentor would have been Annabelle, Tessa knew, returning from the past, bitter and haunted and vengeful. Or Annabelle’s father, bent on ugly retribution, some twisted payback for Tessa’s childhood deal with the devil. But neither could be true.
Soon after the humiliating headline—Mayor’s Daughter Abducted After “Friend” Goes For Ice Cream, one headline sneered—Tessa’s mother had come home, eyes puffy and hair disheveled, clutching her coat.
Tessa’s name had not been mentioned in the articles, since she was a “juvenile,” but everyone in town knew.
Everyone. Back then Tessa felt as if she walked with a force field around her.
No one came close, no one made eye contact, and the whispers grew.
The contempt. The narrow-eyed accusations.
Where was Annabelle? Why was Tessa free, and not the mayor’s beautiful Annabelle?
That day, Tessa’s mother had retreated to her bedroom and locked the door, eventually coming down only to drink coffee as bitterly dark as her words, and staring at the silent wall phone in the kitchen.
“He’s gone,” her mother said. “He told me he cannot bear the sight of you, or even the thought of you, he told me that, and I don’t blame him. You traded her for five dollars and a Popsicle? A Popsicle? What are you doing? Trying to ruin my life?”
As if Tessa had caused it. But she hadn’t disobeyed, she hadn’t let in a stranger, he’d said she knew him. He had a briefcase, and… but no one cared what she said.
Tessa’s mother had hustled them out of town, creating their new identities and new lives.
“You must never ever speak of it. You must never ever tell.” She’d repeated that, a spell or an incantation, in the car on the way to she didn’t know where. “If you do, your life will be ruined. You are Tessa Danforth. Say it.”
“Tessa Danforth,” she tried the name.
“Again.”
“Tessa Danforth.”
“Your future depends on it, Tessa. And mine, too.”
It was easy to be Tessa, in their new home in Massachusetts, where no one cared who they were, or about the new bookish kid in fourth grade.
Her mother tried selling real estate, and lost herself in work.
It wasn’t until teenager Tessa dared to check the then-newish Google that she learned the “mayor’s aide”—actually an embittered former city employee who’d gotten caught picking up the ransom money—had confessed to taking Annabelle.
But in his hatred for the mayor, he refused to reveal what happened to her.
He was murdered, that same week, in prison. Annabelle’s father, the article reported, had died of cancer and grief, never knowing.
Annabelle’s remains were found years after that, tangled in the debris of the Maumee River. This time, Tessa’s mother called her at college with the news, and, Tessa remembered, sounded happy.
“So that’s over.” In one phrase, Tessa’s mother personally obliterated the entire episode. “They suspect he’d killed her, or something happened while he was waiting for the ransom. Anyway, now we know. Don’t ever think of it again.”
“Impossible,” Tessa had told her. “I could never, ever, forget.” And for a while, Annabelle’s voice, a gift, remained in Tessa’s mind. You’re fine, Annabelle would reassure her, every time Tessa felt close to the edge. I’m fine, too. Don’t worry. It was not your fault.
Eventually, though, Annabelle’s comforting voice vanished, and Tessa wondered if she’d lost something fundamental.
Imagination—or childhood—replaced by her first true love, then by the roller coaster of Henry Calloway’s sporadic employment, by the necessity of her new job, by terrific but demanding kids, and school and camp and laundry and mortgage payments.
Until that day in the grocery store. And then so powerfully, so almost materially, when Tessa walked out of Swain and Woodworth. And then the day she typed “Chapter One.”
Finally , Annabelle had said that day. And, yes, of course, use my name. It means I can have more than one life, Tessa. And you can give it to me.
Tessa had burst into tears. Still, she’d changed Annabelle’s last name a bit. To protect everyone.
Now Tessa heard another noise, shrill and close and in her hotel room. She froze.
Then realized it was her phone, her alarm ringing, telling her it was time to wake up and get ready for another day on book tour.
But now it was clear—Tessa was not on tour alone.
Go, Annabelle said. We can’t be late.