Chapter 63
Unless. Unless none of it was true. Unless Harper was a miserable, devious liar.
Exactly, Annabelle said. Good call. You gonna accept this story?
“Harper? Or whatever your name is?” Tessa began.
“You’ve stalked me, and kidnapped me, and called me a murderer.
Now you’re threatening me with blackmail.
” She tried to keep her voice confident, channeling Annabelle.
We’re all a little Annabelle, she told her audiences.
Well now, even belted into the back seat, she was a lot the hell Annabelle.
“I don’t care what you do, I’m calling the police.
It’ll be your word against mine. And I am Tessa Calloway. ”
Word, Annabelle said.
The woman flipped a dismissive palm.
“You are, indeed. But if you do, then we, in turn, will get to pose the question all over social media. Let’s see.
How would I phrase it?” Harper tilted her head one way, then the other.
Eyes on the gray Iowa highway. “How about this? Ahem. ‘Big news! Best-selling author Tessa Calloway was the privileged daughter of insolently affluent and relentlessly protective divorced parents, and, we have learned, as a drunken underage driver she killed someone in a hit-and-run, and we have proof her mother spent the rest of her life paying to keep quiet about it.’”
“Paying.” Even channeling Annabelle, Tessa could not form an entire sentence about this. “Paying who?”
“Oh, you summer people,” Harper said. “You breeze into town, taking up all the room and all the oxygen, with fancy parties and exclusive charity balls, and you never even notice us until we give you the wrong ice cream flavor, or dare to give you a parking ticket. Your mother thought she could pay her way into—or out of—anything. And one thing that’s so beautifully funny.
” The woman held up a punctuating forefinger, still watching the road.
“Turns out she was right. For a while, at least.”
“No. Impossible. I asked you—paying who?”
Cars surrounded them, Tessa could see drivers’ faces pass, one at a time; a young woman apparently singing at the top of her lungs, a bearded man in a red ball cap, a teenager with earbuds.
She’d read somewhere there was a sign for people to give if they were in trouble, but no way she could remember that now.
“Hardly impossible, Tessa. It’s precisely what happened, whether you knew it or not. Your poor mother, trying to protect you from your lies. She made a bargain, didn’t she? A deal with the devil? Where do you think the expression ‘there’ll be the devil to pay’ comes from? She paid.”
“Sheriff Owen”—this person knew about him anyway, no reason to hide it—“told us it was a deer. I never saw a person in the road. It was a deer. And he told my mother it was a deer, too. I saw him do it. She told me that.”
“Please. You only saw what you wanted to see. You created a story about it. And believed it.”
“Of course I believed it. Because it’s true.
” Although she’d never actually seen the deer.
Or anything in the road. If Sheriff Owen had lied, that meant Tessa, on that pivotal night, had unwittingly agreed to make that her truth.
If this woman was right— could she be? That truth would end.
It would all end. Her beloved family, her shiny, brand-new career—she didn’t deserve any of it. She’d bargained it away.
Bull, Annabelle said. You can’t be blackmailed if you have nothing to fear.
This woman had accused her of being complicit in a murder and a cover-up. But Tessa refused to believe that story was true.
Which meant now—Tessa had to bargain again. To protect her family.
But not like this, a prisoner in some stranger’s back seat.
On her own terms.
Because Tessa had recognized her best bargaining chip. She was only valuable to this person if she were successful. And alive.