Chapter 1
Twelve Years Later
Rebecca McIntosh stood in the middle of her Toronto apartment, questioning all her life choices. Meanwhile, her subletter surveyed the surroundings with bewilderment. “There are so many…books. On, like, all the shelves.”
Chrysanthemum was a twenty-year-old communications student at the University of Toronto with jelly-textured nails and hair in a shiny ponytail. Rebecca’s dark brown curls were falling out of a topknot and her nails were chewed to the quick.
“I teach literature at the university,” Rebecca offered by way of explanation, while Chrysanthemum’s expression reflected what Rebecca was quite certain was sympathy.
Then she turned and clomped across the room in white platform sneakers before stopping in front of a sagging shelf of Bronte, Hardy, and dog-eared Norton anthologies.
“Do you read these?”
“Well, I did. And my students do, I hope,” Rebecca said, but her wry humor was lost on Chrysanthemum.
And suddenly, Rebecca could see her point.
Why would anyone be so interested in the same old stories about drafty mansions, angry men disguised as passionate lovers, women with no autonomy?
Why had she allowed herself to decide in high school, when she didn’t know any better, the books that were going to define her career?
She tucked an errant lock of hair behind her ear and straightened her shoulders.
“Anyway, I’m on a short leave right now.
Which is why I’m subletting to you for the month, while I go back to my hometown to take care of some business.
” Rebecca checked her watch. “There are some boxes in the spare room closet,” she added.
“If you want to put the books away to make room for your stuff, feel free. I’d love to help, but I have to get going. ”
If she was going to make it to Bramley Hollow in time for dinner with her best friend, Sabrina, she needed to leave now. But she heard Chrysanthemum gasp from another room and went running.
“Are those real? Those can’t be here!” She pointed a trembling hand at Rebecca’s admittedly large collection of succulent plants and let out a delicate cough. “You did not say anything about being a collector of dusty old books and succulents.”
“I’m not a collector of— Well, I can see that it looks that way.” There were at least a dozen of them; Rebecca had lost count at some point. “My ex-boyfriend—he thought I loved succulents.”
“How long has he been an ex-boyfriend?” Chrysanthemum asked, eyebrow raised.
“Oh, ages,” Rebecca said. “We’re just friends now.
He’s a professor here. We…” She trailed off, thought of Tom, with his tall, gangly frame and kind smile, and how hard it had been to tell him she wasn’t in love with him.
But he had moved on, was engaged to a fellow professor in his department.
“Tom and I are still friends,” she concluded weakly.
“And I really have to go.” At this point, Rebecca could practically hear her watch ticking a warning.
Because she knew every second counted, and not just because of traffic.
A few weeks earlier, Crispin Klune, Rebecca’s former classmate, now the chair of Bramley Hollow’s Business Improvement Association, had called her in a flap.
He had told her if she did not return to town as soon as possible to deal with her family’s long-closed diner and apartment above, which were, as he put it, “falling to rack and ruin,” there would be a town hall meeting about the matter, and action might need to be taken.
Rebecca had tried to tell Crispin that since her Grannie Lenore had passed away the year before, she just hadn’t had the chance to come back to town and deal with the building—but she had been paying a landscaping company to keep the grass around the building tidy, and wasn’t that enough?
Apparently not. Crispin had given her a thirty-day timeline and Rebecca had wondered where the sweet, bespectacled boy she had known in high school had gone.
Rebecca realized Chrysanthemum was watching her with alarm. “Rebecca, are you okay? Did you know mold exposure can cause cognitive impairment?”
“I’m fine, honestly.”
But now she looked even more worried. “Did the man who gave you these break your heart? Are you still in love? Are you going to miss him so much when you’re gone?”
Rebecca opened her mouth, then closed it.
She suddenly wondered what it might be like to be the sort of person who had a different answer.
Who could say that, yes, she had once had a relationship so passionate, so intense, that it had ruined her—but that it had been worth it, to have experienced a love so deep.
This wasn’t the case with Tom, though. Passion had never really entered into things.
If she was being honest, what she was going to miss most during her leave of absence was the faculty book club.
They had read a coming-of-age novel called All That Life Can Afford this month, and she had really been looking forward to discussing it.
“He really didn’t,” Rebecca said, and hoped she sounded firm.
But Chrysanthemum still clutched her phone to her chest as if it were a medical device, then sneezed. “Tiny spores,” she said through a stuffy-sounding nose. “You said you had boxes in the spare room? Let’s put the plants in one of those. You can take them with you.”
“All done,” Rebecca said brightly, after she had piled the succulents into the box she procured, watching as half of them tilted over and spilled out dirt.
She said goodbye to Chrysanthemum and left the apartment.
But when she got to the row of garbage bins outside the Victorian house where she rented the top floor, she found herself unable to throw the succulents away.
She peered into the box and suddenly thought that maybe cavalierly tossing all that was left of her one relationship was a bad idea.
Weren’t people supposed to hang on to things like this, sentimental artifacts from their romantic pasts—like Marian Halcombe with her letters in The Woman in White?
She turned and headed toward her hatchback, put the box of succulents in the almost-empty trunk, then slammed it shut.
Rebecca then took in the early-September afternoon, marveling, despite her bleak mood, at the way the sky in September always seemed to be a brighter shade of blue than it was the rest of the year, perhaps because of the way it contrasted with the golds, oranges, and reds of the turning leaves.
Spadina Avenue was lined with large Victorian and Edwardian mansions like the one where she’d rented the top floor ever since finishing her PhD and landing the lecturer position at the university.
It was steady enough work to afford a small apartment in a beautiful old house, but it was not quite the life she’d imagined, not yet.
Tall, leafy maples stood in front of most of the houses.
The U of T campus could be seen in the distance: the gothic spire of Hart House, the buildings with their bricks like stacked pats of butter, richly patinaed with age, where her colleagues were already preparing syllabi she should have been revising herself.
A red-and-white TTC streetcar clanged past, crowded with university students and commuters.
Normally at this time of year, Rebecca would get caught up in that back-to-school feeling that had drawn her to academia in the first place: the smell of new books, the promise of sharpened pencils, clean slates.
There was just something about September.
It had always felt like possibility, like the beginning of the life she’d worked for.
Rebecca had studied literature at the University of Toronto on scholarship, all the while convincing herself that the quiet precision of Victorian novels, their great passions, their moral feuds and secret rebellions, could sustain her always.
She had raced through her PhD, finishing it a year early, and stayed on as a lecturer.
The plan had been clear: work hard, publish, earn tenure, become the sort of scholar whose name appeared in footnotes.
Only, she had run out of things to say about the books she had been reading all her life.
Now, at twenty-nine, she couldn’t shake the sense that the path ahead of her led to only more of the same.
Committee meetings, conference papers, essays no one read.
She had expected to feel something by now, but she couldn’t remember anymore what that was.
Maybe passion.
A cyclist whizzed by, dangerously close, startling her out of her reverie with his jangling bell.
She stepped away from the curb and opened her car door.
She knew it was time to go home, to Bramley Hollow.
She couldn’t avoid it any longer. She slid into the driver’s seat and told herself she was ready.