“I know who Hannah is,” I said. “Who doesn’t?”
“Hannah gave your mother some water.”
“Oh, no.”
“And when she woke up…she had no idea how she’d gotten there. We assumed it was amnesia from her head injury, not because—”
“She drank fairyland water,” I said.
Nancy nodded.
“We nursed her back to health for the next month. She was weak after her injury, but she could talk. I sat by her bedside for hours, reading with her and telling her about our life, trying to help her remember hers. She only knew her name—Ellery March—because it was on her library card in her pocket. Otherwise…she was a mystery.”
“And Nancy Drew can’t resist a mystery.”
“Never! And, it turned out, my father couldn’t resist your mother. The longer she stayed with us, the closer they grew. Of course they fell in love.” She sighed as if recalling one of her happiest memories. “They were married on the lawn. I was maid of honor. Then I had to go and ruin it.”
“How?”
“I’m a fictional sleuth,” Nancy said. “We always solve every mystery. Eventually, I put the pieces together and realized, well, everything. Your mother was real. We were fictional. This was a story we were in, not the real world. I even found her umbrella still in the woods, open, so no one had spotted her in my story. When I told her everything I’d discovered, it all came rushing back. But by then, she was eight months pregnant with you.”
“That’s why she finally left? Because she remembered who she was?”
“It was only supposed to be a short visit,” Nancy said. “She needed to see her parents and let them know she was safe and happy. She promised she would come back in a day or two. She told Dad she was going on a quick shopping trip to the big city for baby things.”
“But she never came back,” I said.
Nancy put her fork down and glanced away, and for a split second I could see all the grief and loneliness and sorrow that was so deep and wounding that even her authors had hidden it from readers. For one year, she’d had a stepmother who loved her, whom she had loved, and a new sibling on the way.
“No,” she said. “She never came back.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Nancy put on a brave face and carried on. “When your mother left us to go visit her parents,” she continued, “she warned me to be on the lookout for a Book Witch who might appear and charm us into forgetting she ever existed. Sure enough, shortly after she left, a woman appeared.”
“What did she look like?”
“Like a young Dr. Fanshawe.”
My stomach clenched. “I knew it. No, I didn’t know it, but I knew she didn’t like me.”
“Like you or not, she’s terrified of you,” Nancy said. “Of what you represent. Why do you think she lied all this time about what a perfect, ideal, rule-following toady of a Book Witch your mother was? So you would never ever for even a single second entertain the possibility that you’re the daughter of a fictional character.”
My mother…she hadn’t broken one rule. She’d broken all the rules. She hadn’t been a follower, but, like Duke had said, a rebel.
“Why is that so terrifying to her?” I asked.
“Because she loves rules, and if you’re half-fictional, that means the rules don’t apply to you.”
I gasped softly. She was right. If Dr. Fanshawe had said it once, she’d said it a thousand times—fictional characters belong in stories and real people belong in the real world.
“Iamhalf-fictional, which means I…I do belong in books.”
“Precisely,” Nancy said. “Which means you can stay in any story you want—no rules broken. Which means you can change any story you want. If you want you could even change this one, and no one could stop you.”
I could change stories…even this one? To test the premise, I glanced in the mirror and suddenly…my dark hair turned blond.
With a wink it went from long and straight to short and bobbed.
