Georgia
“Oh my God,” I whispered, the last page fluttering to the floor between my feet. My breath came in a stuttered gasp as a pair of tears splattered on the paper.
Gran wasn’t Scarlett…she was Constance.
There was a roaring in my ears, as though the cogs in my mind were spinning at quadruple time, trying to process it all, to make sense of what she’d written.
All these years, and she’d never said a word. Not one. She’d taken her secret to her grave, carried it alone. Or had Grandpa Brian known?
I picked up the fallen page, filed it at the end of the chapter, then shuffled it back into the envelope. Why didn’t she tell me? Why now, when I couldn’t ask?
The seal broke easily on the third envelope, and I nearly ripped the papers in my haste to read them.
My dearest Georgia,
Do you hate me? I wouldn’t blame you. There were certainly days where I hated myself, where I signed her name and felt every inch the fraud I was. But this letter isn’t for me; it’s for you. So allow me to answer the obvious questions.
As we flew over the North Atlantic, William fell asleep, zipped in and warm with Vernon. That’s when the reality of what I’d done hit hard. There were so many ways it could go wrong, and yet I couldn’t come
clean, not with William in the balance. It would only be a matter of time before the truth was revealed and I was forced back to England. All I needed was enough time to meet Jameson’s family—to know for certain that William would be in good hands. I had to play the part.
I took paper and pen from the handbag, then bid farewell to Constance, knowing that posting this letter would only serve to help convince my family that William was out of reach.
Two days after we arrived in the States, I posted that letter and stumbled upon a British paper in the lobby of our hotel. It listed the recent casualties from the June air raids. My heart stopped the moment I read CONSTANCE WADSWORTH listed among the dead. That’s when I remembered that it was my handbag the ambulance drivers had taken with my sister.
Heaven help me, that’s when I realized I could stay with William, not just until he was settled but forever. To my mother, father, and Henry, Constance was dead. No one had challenged it. I was free, but only as Scarlett. My temporary lie became my life.
Vernon took me to immigration, where I was given a new identification card—this time with my picture. My face was still swollen from the bombing, my nose bandaged until the moment the photographer flashed
his camera. The other identifying features—the scar and our beauty marks—matched perfectly, as they always had.
Jameson’s family was so warm, so welcoming, even in the face of their unbearable grief. I watched the light slowly die in his mother’s eyes as the months, then the years passed and no news came from the front about Jameson’s disappearance. I didn’t have to feign grief—my sorrow was all too real for the loss of Jameson and Edward, but mostly my sister.
From the moment I was born, she’d been at my side. We’d been educated together, sworn to see the war through together, and yet there I was, raising her son in a foreign country that was now my own, practicing her signature over and over, then burning the pages so no one would be suspicious.
The first real challenge came the day Beatrice asked when I planned to begin writing again. Oh, I looked like my sister and even sounded like her. I knew the most intimate details of her life, but writing…that had never been my talent. Perhaps I should have told them, then, but the fear of being separated from William was more than I could bear. So, I pretended to write when no one was looking. I retyped The Diplomat’s Daughter page by page,
fixing grammatical errors and tweaking a few passages so I could honestly say I’d written something in it. I realized that lies were easier when they were based on truth, so I injected truth at every possible turn.
I didn’t submit The Diplomat’s Daughter for publication. Beatrice did the year the war ended. The year we finished the gazebo at the bend in the creek where Jameson asked Scarlett to wait for him. That was the year Beatrice accepted what I’d already known. Jameson wasn’t coming home. I helped build a gazebo for a future that only existed in my imagination, a future where love and tragedy didn’t walk hand in hand.
The problem with signing that first book deal was the request for the second, the third, the fourth. I went through the hatbox, used her partial chapters, her plot notes, and when my own heart failed, I simply imagined she was beside me, hiding in our parents’ house, walking the long roads, sitting at that kitchen table, telling me what happened next. In that way, she lived in every book I typed, then the ones I wrote as the hatbox emptied.
I had the house built big enough for Jameson’s family, and we moved.
Then Brian came along. Oh, Georgia, I fell for his
warm eyes and soft smile that very first year he rented the cottage. It wasn’t the same as I’d felt for Edward—that had been a once-in-a-lifetime love— but it was steady, warm, and as gentle as the spring thaw. After Henry…well, I needed gentle.
Beatrice saw. She knew.
William saw it, too. He never voiced his disapproval. Never made me feel guilty. But the year he turned sixteen, he found Brian and me dancing in the gazebo. The phonograph disappeared the next day. He had his father’s smile and his passion for life and his mother’s eyes and steel will. He was the best thing I’d ever done with my life, and the day he married Hannah—the love of his life—he told me it was time to marry mine.
I told him the love of my life had been taken by the war—that was the truth.
He told me Jameson would want me to be happy— that was true, too.
Every year Brian asked. Every year I said no.
Georgia, there exists within me a gray, shadowy place where I am both the girl I was…and the woman I became that day, both Constance and Scarlett. And in that gray place, I was still married to Henry Wadsworth—though he had remarried and moved his new family onto the land I’d ruined myself to protect.
The land where he’d buried my sister in his one and only romantic gesture. And perhaps the girl who had been so egregiously abused took a perverse pleasure that she could bring his life toppling down by simply admitting that she was alive.
The woman I was refused to allow the shadow to dim Brian’s light—refused to bring him into a marriage that would ultimately be as fraudulent as I was—but I could never tell him the truth—that would have made him complicit in my crimes. He stopped asking in 1968.
The day I read that Henry Wadsworth had died of a massive stroke, I raced to the veterinary clinic where Brian worked and begged him to ask me again. Only after William had given his blessing did I tell the lawyers to start the paperwork for Jameson.
I married Brian seventeen years after we met, and the decade we were married was the happiest of my life. I found my happily-ever-after. Never doubt that. William and Hannah had tried so long for a child, and Ava was the apple of their eye—and mine. I wish you had known her before the accident, Georgia. Tragedy has a way of breaking gentle things and soldering the shattered pieces together in ways we can’t control. Some, it remakes into stronger, more resilient creatures. In others, the pieces fuse before
they heal, leaving only razor-sharp edges. I can offer you no other explanation or excuse for the way she’s cut you over the years.
You, my sweet girl, were the light of my very long life.
You were my reason to slow down, to live with more intention, less fear.
You, Georgia, who remind me so very much of my sister.
You have her indomitable will, her strong heart, her fierce spirit, and her eyes—my eyes.
I pray that this package finds you happy and madly in love with the man you’ve deemed worthy of your heart. I also hope you’ve realized by now that man isn’t Damian—not unless he’s had an epiphany between what is now your sixth year of marriage, and when you open this on your seventh anniversary. And yes, I get to say that because I’m dead. When I was alive, you were determined, and heaven help the soul who tries to change your stubborn little mind. Some lessons we simply have to learn for ourselves.
So why tell you, now that I’m gone? Why lay this truth at your feet when I trusted no one else? Because you, more than any other Stanton, need to know that it is love that brought you here. I’ve never seen another love like Scarlett and Jameson’s. It was one
of those fated lightning strikes, miraculous to see up close, to feel the energy between the two when they were in the same room. That is the love that lives in your veins.
I’ve never seen another love like I had for Edward
—we were twin flames.
But I’ve also never seen another love like I had for Brian—deep and calm and true.
Or another love like William’s for Hannah— achingly sweet.
But I have seen the same love that I had for William the day I stepped onto that plane. It lives in you. You are the culmination of every lightning strike and twist of fate.
Do not settle for the love that hones your edges and turns you brittle and cold, Georgia. Not when there are so many other kinds of love waiting for you. And don’t wait like I did, wasting seventeen years because I’d left one bitter foot in my past.
We’re all entitled to our mistakes. When you recognize them for what they are, don’t live there. Life is too short to miss the lightning strike and too long to live it alone. This is where my story ends. I’ll be watching over you to see where yours leads.
All my love,
Gran
Tears dripped down my face as I finished the last page, and they weren’t the pretty, silent ones. Oh no, I was a snotty mess.
She’d lived seventy-eight years of her life as Scarlett, never being called by her own name. Never letting someone else help carry the burden of what she’d done. She’d borne the deaths of Edward, Jameson, Scarlett, Brian… then William and Hannah, yet hadn’t hardened under the grief.
I left the letter on the steps, then clutched my phone and stumbled to the office. Snatching the framed picture of Scarlett and Jameson from the desk, I hit my knees in front of the bookshelf cabinets and dug through the contents to find the same albums I’d shown to Noah months ago.
William. William. William. The first picture of Gran had been taken in 1950, long enough after the Ipswich bombing that no one would question any physical differences. She hadn’t just shied away from the camera lens, she’d studiously avoided it.
I studied both pictures, needing to see it for myself.
Scarlett’s chin was slightly sharper, Constance’s lower lip a bit fuller. Same nose. Same eyes. Same beauty mark. But they were not the same woman.
People see what they want to see. How many times had she said that to me over the years? Everyone had simply accepted that Constance was Scarlett because they’d never had reason to question it. Why would they when she had William?
The gardening. The tiny style differences Noah had spotted. The baking…it all made sense.
I flipped through the album until I found her wedding picture to Grandpa Brian. There was real, true love shining in her eyes. Noah’s ending had been truer to life than he could have known…but it wasn’t Scarlett’s ending, it was Constance’s.
Scarlett had died on a ruined street nearly eighty years ago. Jameson couldn’t have been far off. They hadn’t been apart for long. They’d been
together all this time.
I sucked in a shaky breath and wiped my tears on my sleeve as I fumbled with my cell phone.
If Gran had lived a lie to give me this life, then I owed it to her to live it. The message I’d sent to Noah still hadn’t been read, but I called him anyway. Four rings. Voicemail. The guy didn’t even have a personalized message, and I wasn’t about to pour my heart out on a voicemail anyway.
Besides, with the reviews out, it was no wonder he wasn’t answering.
I gasped. Reviews were out. Stumbling to my feet, I slid into the chair at my desk, then clicked through my emails until I found Adam’s number.
“Adam Feinhold,” he answered.
“Adam, it’s Georgia,” I blurted. “Stanton, I mean.”
“I figured it wasn’t the state calling,” he drawled dryly. “What can I do for you, Ms. Stanton? It’s a bit…heavy around here today.”
“Yeah, I deserve that,” I admitted, cringing like he could see me. “Look, I tried Noah first—”
“I have no clue where he is. He left me a message that he was off on some research trip and he’d be back in time for any release promo we need.”
I blinked. “Noah’s…gone?”
“Not gone. Researching. Don’t stress, he does it every book but yours, since you know, the research had already been done.”
“Oh.” My heart sank. So much for seizing the lightning bolt.
“You know the guy is pretty much dying over you, right?” Adam said softly. “And I say that as his best friend, not his editor. He’s miserable. Or at least he was miserable. This morning he just sounded pissed, but that was after the reviews came out. Christopher is even more pissed, which as editorial director is absolutely possible, trust me.”
I was twenty-four hours too late to tell him I’d been wrong. Really wrong. But maybe I could show him. At least I could try. “Did Noah really edit both versions?”
“Yep. Copy edits and all. Told you, he’s a mess over you.”
“Good.” I smiled, too happy to clarify that statement. “Good?”
“Yep. Good. Now go get Christopher.”
