Total pages in book: 152
Estimated words: 145574 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 728(@200wpm)___ 582(@250wpm)___ 485(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 145574 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 728(@200wpm)___ 582(@250wpm)___ 485(@300wpm)
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.