Chapter 48
It was all Tessa could do not to hang up. But this day had taught her, profoundly, that hiding the truth did not make it go away.
The question was now whether to lie about it.
Why would it matter if she knew Blytheton?
She’d been there two summers, then made the dumb teenage decision to let Emily drive her mother’s rental, and her mom refused to go back the next year.
Too embarrassing . Mother had dismissed it, imperious.
You ruined everything. But that was, what, twenty years ago?
Why was a neighbor—Nellie? Or Barbara?—asking about Blytheton?
“Are you listening to me?” Henry was saying.
“Oh, absolutely, honey.” Tessa looked at her watch, in mock surprise. “Oh, wow, I have to get ready.”
“Isn’t your event tonight?”
“Exactly.” He could know that from the schedule.
“I have to, um, talk to Sadie Bailey, and check in with DJ, and connect with the bookstore, all kinds of things. And you’re right about low blood sugar…
” She was babbling, but did not want to talk about Maine.
It was so much to explain. “I need to get food. Can we talk about this tomorrow?”
“Well—”
“Safe safe, love love,” she said, hurriedly invoking a short version of their nighttime mantra. She had to get off the phone.
“Always always.” Henry shook his head. “Strange to say that so early.”
“And it’s even earlier here. But doesn’t matter,” Tessa said. “It’s the principle.”
“You’re so funny,” Henry said. “We miss you around here.”
“Do you?” She truly wondered about that. “This is all worth it, though. Isn’t it?”
Now there definitely was a shadow. And unless Henry turned the laptop to show her, there was absolutely no way she could prove it.
“Someone just came in.” Tessa made it a statement rather than a question.
Henry glanced to his right. The same direction Tessa had seen the shadow. “Nope. Just me. We’ll talk tomorrow then?”
“Sure.”
“What’s wrong now?”
“Huh?” Tessa feigned bafflement. “I said sure. Sure means okay, talk to you tomorrow. Everything doesn’t have to mean something else.”
“Sure,” Henry said. “Bring home the bacon.”
Trying to forget the miles between them. Tessa blew a kiss into the screen. And Henry pretended to catch it.
But as her husband flapped his laptop closed, her last glimpse was a slash of yellow. And a shadow.
Tessa swung her legs off the side of the bed. “There was no shadow, this is all a coincidence, you are making stuff up,” Tessa said out loud. She waggled her shoulders, shaking it off. “Get food. Take a shower. Take a nap. Get your life together.”
She guessed what button on the remote would turn the television on, and for background noise and video companionship, clicked to the all-news channel.
Familiar-looking lipsticked and coiffed faces split-screened with muted video of a far-off war playing behind them brought her back to the troubles of the real world, far more serious than her own long-ago past.
There was a split-screen world of book tour, too; half of it gut-wrenching, high-speed activity, the other half suspended animation.
A ping on her messages. Puget Sound Books, the caller ID said. Ethan Cornish.
Got time for a call? Abt tonight?
So nice of him to check in on her.
Sure. All okay?
Ethan’s reply was the ringing phone.
A billion terrible things sprang to mind in the span of that one ring. No books had arrived, no one had registered to attend her event, the store was flooded, there was about to be a massive storm. She checked out the window; saw the fog had cleared, halfway, and the sky did not look ominous.
“Hi,” she said, trying not to sound worried. “Is—?”
“Making sure you’ve arrived, and settled in, with no complications.”
“Yes, I—”
“So listen. About tonight.”
Tessa’s heart plummeted. That was a real thing, not a figure of speech, she physically felt it happen. “Is everything okay?”
Ethan was silent for an excruciating second. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
There were way too many answers for that, but Tessa simply agreed. “True,” she said. “What’s the plan?”
“Well, okay. We solicit questions in advance, online, before the audience arrives. I know you’re fabulous, but sometimes authors aren’t. So we always have Q and A only. I ask, and give the name of the questioner, you answer. You on board with that?”
“Sure,” Tessa said, making sure she sounded like she was telling the truth.
“Again, it’s not you. It’s our audience,” Ethan went on. “If we let the audience play a bigger role, then they feel invested.”
“Okay, got it.” It would be a treat not to give her speech, she’d done it so many times. “So I’ll see you at about—”
“Anyway,” Ethan interrupted. “We were organizing the questions, and they’re… they’re unusual.”
“Unusual?”
“Yeah. We have”—he paused—“seventeen inquiries about where you spent summers as a child.”
Tessa could hear a sound, a high-pitched sound of nothing, the elec tricity in her room, or the mechanics of the air conditioner, or the constant transmissions of the universe.
“Did you,” Ethan was saying, “put something on social media about that? To elicit the question?”
“Nope, not at all,” she said, her keeping her voice bright and intrigued. “I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned summers on social.”
“Huh,” Ethan said.
“It’s hardly sinister, though,” she lied. What connected Maine to Ohio? Emily. Only Emily. That she knew of. “It’s summer now, and a pretty relatable thing.”
“I suppose.”
“Are they all from the same person?” She scrambled for an additional explanation. “Maybe someone hit Enter too many times.”
“Good point, and we aren’t able to track that. So could be. There’s a place to enter a name, but they were blank.”
“So funny.” She’d ease Ethan’s mind about this. Erase it. “Okay, thanks for prepping me. I’m not worried.”
“We are. Kind of.” Ethan’s voice had hardened.
“You are what?” She realized what he meant. “Worried? You’re worried?”
Again, a beat of silence. “We don’t want any trouble, Tessa. If there’s a disruption in the works, you need to tell us. I can call your publicist in New York, see if they’ve heard anything. But—”
“No, no,” Tessa interrupted, watching the dumpster fire of her life combust into roaring flame. “I agree it’s odd, but I can’t imagine.…”
Even as she spoke, she felt the doom clouds gathering. No one wanted an author who was a problem, no matter how many books she sold.
“This summer vacation thing doesn’t seem random,” Ethan said. “We’ve done this countless times, and this is new. I know fans can get—squirrelly. And we’re afraid that might be happening now.”