Tara snorts. “I wish I was more calculating. Maybe I wouldn’t have gotten myself into this mess. Half the time, I feel like a chewed-up bone a dog left behind.”
Taylor stifles a laugh. There’s a rawness, an individuality—an imperfection—to Tara that is endearing.
“Why’d you leave me that note, anyway?”
“I wanted to warn you to stay away.”
“Why?” Taylor presses.
“ ’Cause I didn’t want you to end up like me.” Tara says it so simply, like it makes all the sense in the world.
Tara and Taylor,you’re like flip sides of the same coin,Sam had joked earlier. Taylor had finally come clean to him about a lot. But not everything. For some reason, she’d still held a few things back.
We are not remotely alike, Taylor had shot back to Sam, but now, looking at this girl before her—and hearing her story—Taylor wonders if he is right after all. Tara’s like a cautionary tale of what could have happened to Taylor, of what may have happened to many other girls. And yet Taylor still feels tendrils of envy creeping up through her mind and coloring the way she’s hearing the story, the way she’s viewing Tara.
And what’s that envy for? Taylor forces herself to ask the question, and to answer it, even though she doesn’t want to.
This is a woman who was used and manipulated and lied to; whose pregnancy was dealt with by the Knox like the trash they so carefully remove; who almost lost everything, andyet—here she is meeting the world with a forthrightness, a comfort with herself, that Taylor utterly lacks. Taylor thinks of all the time she’s spent agonizing over who she is; how she appears to people; how much effort she’s spent fitting herself into other people’s expectations in the least obtrusive way she can. Then she looks at Tara’s smile, and she understands what a waste of time it’s all been.
Something suddenly occurs to Taylor. “What would’ve happened to Vivian, if you left?” she asks. “You said you’d step in if you thought anything bad was going to happen to her, but if you left, then who would have looked out for her?”
“Vivian was getting better,” Tara declares, with a hopeful lilt. “And I think they were kinda giving up on trying to track down her friend Xavier. They tried, like, everything. I figured at some point, they had to just let Vivian go, right?”
Xavier.That was who Rachel had mentioned in the bookstore. The friend one who went AWOL.
Taylor remembers what Rachel said about Vivian’s fake email:She asked me where Xavier is…which felt like the real reason for the email.And then there was that offhand comment Rose had uttered, the night of the fire:To hell with her little friend.Is Tara insinuating that the real reason Vivian had been kidnapped was to find Xavier? But why?
“I thought they abducted Vivian because of her ancestry,” Taylor finally says, once she’s let the conversation hang longer than she should.
“Huh?” Tara says, her eyebrows knitting together. For someone their age, she has the beginning of some deep forehead lines. It might be because she’s always contorting her face in various expressions.
“You know, how Vivian is a descendant of the Knox and stands to inherit money? Where does that piece fit in?”
Tara starts grinning. Then she raises her small hand to her mouth as if trying to hide an erupting giggle, lest she offend Taylor. “That’s a plotline for a different book, Taylor. Not this one.”
She doesn’t actually know about Vivian’s ancestry, Taylor realizes.
“You’d be surprised,” she replies.
Vivian
Three Months After the Fire
Vivian can still detect a hint of smoke in the air when she walks to her antiques store. Her neurologist assures her it’s not a medical thing, implying that it’s in her imagination.
But Vivian is not convinced; she feels changed in a way that is difficult to describe. She’s slower these days, yes, that is obvious, on account of the TBI she’s still recovering from. Descriptive words are harder to grasp; she’s more forgetful, she’s tired, and she has some memory lapses. Sometimes she’ll go to the grocery store, for instance, and forget what it is she’s gone there to buy.
She’s been assured these symptoms will improve with time.
“Think of your brain like a muscle,” her neurologist says. “You need to exercise it, use it. Try doing some puzzles.”
She doesn’t tell him that she dislikes puzzles.
And then there is the other injury she’s still recovering from: her wrist fracture. She has returned to her trusty physical therapist at Mass General, Connor, whom she saw when she fractured her shoulder.
“You must’ve missed me,” he teases.
But there’s more. Like the smell of fire that tickles her nostrils. And sometimes it’s not fire but rather an ammonia smell. And then there’s the way her feet sometimes pull her in the direction of the Knox, as if they’ve a mind of their own. The Knox is a pile of rubbish on the inside now, stripped to its guts, with Ryan Jessee Construction vehicles often parked outside. But even so, Vivian feels oddly connected to the place, like—and she dare not tell this to anyone, lest they promptly return her to the hospital for a different reason—like it’s alive in some way.
