Chapter 62
Strapped into the back seat and speeding down an Iowa highway, Tessa felt that night in Maine summers ago wash over her in strobed flashes of disconnected sounds and scenes.
Emily pleading to drive. The jangle of the keys as Tessa reluctantly relinquished them to her.
The fragrance of beer and pine woods. The onyx night, the radio blaring about surfers and sunshine, Emily flipping the headlights off, head thrown back, daring the universe to stop her.
The ugly sound of the rental car hitting something.
Tessa could almost feel her knees shaking now, the way they had when she’d opened her door. “Don’t look,” they’d whispered to each other.
Emily trembling, her skin clammy with fear and dread. Emily’s father’s condemnatory whisper, “ You should have protected her .”
The sheriff told her they’d hit a deer. A deer.
She’d been sad, for twenty years, about that deer.
If it had been a person—she would have known. She would have.
She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering suddenly, staring at the flat Iowa highway now unspooling in front of her.
But if her mother had paid for someone’s silence, to cover up something horrific and devastating, then it must have been true.
Her mother would not have paid for a deer.
If Emily had killed a person that night—and Tessa had been with her—the sheriff might have tried to protect them.
Protect his daughter, and protect his reputation.
He certainly could have made a body disappear.
And—she assumed—also had the power to do it leaving no evidence, resulting in no investigations or repercussions.
He had gone to look at it, that she remembered, gone to look at the deer. And then talked to her mother.
Her mother would not have paid for a lie.
Or would she? Her mother had been lying their entire lives.
Her mother. If what this person said was true— if —she must have known about the real victim.
And that’s why she’d lived in such tormented silence.
She’d been protecting her daughter. Hiding her complicity.
Her crime. Until she died, too. Of grief, Tessa would have to accept that now. And of disappointment. In her.
Would she be proud of Tessa now? Would she think her bargain was worth it?
Mile markers flew by, as if marking chapters of her own life, going too fast, unstoppable, unreadable, relentless. It was as if she were a fictional character. She had lived a fictional life for the past twenty years, and now her backstory had come to destroy her.
Not the bad thing she’d feared. Not her wrenching childhood decision.
But a bargain her mother made to protect her. A bargain Tessa hadn’t even known existed.
Right now, at this moment, in a stranger’s car on this dreary and cornfield-lined highway, time and history were catching up with her.
It had begun the moment her book deal was announced, and then, the past had followed her.
Stalked her. To Rockport, and to Seattle, and to San Diego, and in every bookstore and every hotel.
Henry did not know about that night, she’d never thought to bring such a thing up, hitting a deer almost two decades ago. Back then, she and Emily had shared two magical summers. Which ended the night of the crash.
When—could it possibly be?—the impetuous, invulnerable Emily had not hit a deer.
Henry. She put a palm to her heart at the thought. And the kids. How would she explain to Linny and Zack? Her life was over.
In her book she left white space for emphasis, to give her readers time to breathe. She needed that now, white space.
She had killed two people. Two.
Yes. She was responsible for what happened to Annabelle, because she could have—done something. Run upstairs and get Annabelle. But she hadn’t. Or refused to open the door. But she had. And now it sounded, astonishingly, like she was liable for yet another person’s death.
It didn’t matter that she’d believed Sheriff Owen. What happened had happened. To a real person. Whose life she and Emily had taken. She could not pretend that away.
The crushing reality almost suffocated her, that to the thousands of people who’d loved her book, and relied on her, and admired her, Tessa would soon and inevitably become a shocking disappointment, a flash in the social media pan, a quickly fading memory, and all that would be left was conjecture and embarrassment and disgrace.
It would all come out. All of it. She’d be the answer to an obscure trivia question. Fodder for the tabloids.
Now, this New York Times best-selling author is serving a life sentence for a deadly hit-and-run, and the ensuing cover-up. The disgraced Calloway also turned out to be the little girl in the—
Little girl. Oh. Her heart plummeted, free-falling.
Linny. Henry. Zackie. How would they remember her?
How would their dear lives be twisted by her transgression?
She understood, with stabbing brutal intensity, how her mother must have felt at the end.
Police, investigating her unattended death, had reported it as a heart attack, but what if she’d—who knew what.
Taken pills. Or not taken them. Anything to end it.
She could almost imagine doing the same thing herself, ending it.
Grabbing the wheel, pulling and twisting and crashing and not caring, and no one would know anything, they would be a mangled pile of metal on the side of the road—how sad, people would say, that was the famous Tessa Calloway, her career cut so tragically short on an Iowa highway.
Or she would go to prison for life.
And never see her children again. She was a murderer. She had only one option.
In one motion she could unclick her seat belt and get to her feet and yank the wheel and make it all end.