The Van Alen Legacy

If she didn’t take the time to remember who she had been, then the Visitor would take over completely. And the real Bliss Llewellyn, the girl who had once failed her driving test in an old 1950s Cadillac convertible, would be no longer. Not even this half-faded memory of her that lingered in a small corner of her brain.

So. They were in the Hamptons. It was morning. She was getting up for breakfast; her servant was calling for her. No; not her servant—her father. “Servant” was the Visitor’s word for Forsyth, not hers. Sometimes that happened. Sometimes she would find she could hear the Visitor so clearly. But then a door would slam, and she would be on the other side, in the dark again. The Visitor had access to her past, to her entire life, but she had no entree to his. His conversations with Forsyth were behind a closed door, his thoughts hidden in shadow.

A part of her was relieved that the Visitor did not talk to her anymore. She dimly remembered that there had been little conversations between them once, but those had ceased. Now there was just silence. She understood it was because he didn’t need to communicate with her any longer to assume control. He used to take over during her blackouts, but now he did not need them to do what he pleased. He was in the driver’s seat.

Still, she wasn’t exactly abandoned on the side of the road, either. She had answered the first question successfully, hadn’t she?

She was Bliss Llewellyn. The daughter of Senator Forsyth Llewellyn and stepdaughter of the late BobiAnne Shepherd. She had grown up in Houston until her family moved to Manhattan soon after her fifteenth birthday. She was a student at the Duchesne School on E. 96th Street, and her favorite hobbies were, in no particular order: cheerleading, shopping, and modeling. Oh my god, I’m a bimbo, Bliss thought. There had to be more to her than that.

Start again. Okay. Her name was Bliss Llewellyn, and she’d grown up in a big, grand house in Houston’s River Oaks neighborhood, but her favorite part of Texas was her Pop-Pop’s ranch, where she would ride horses over lush prairies blanketed with wildflowers. Her favorite subject in school was Art Humanities, and one day she had hoped to own her own art gallery or, barring that, become a curator at the Met.

She was Bliss Llewellyn, and right now she was in the Hamptons. An upscale beach community two hours away from Manhattan (depending on traffic) where people from the city went to “get away from it all” only to find themselves smack-dab in the middle of everything. August in the Hamptons was as frantic as September in New York. Back when she was still just Bliss and not a vessel for evil (or V.F.E., as she had come to think of her situation when she wanted to laugh instead of cry), her stepmother had dragged them out here because it was “the thing to do.”

BobiAnne had been big on “the thing to do” and had compiled a huge list of dos and don’ts—you’d think she had been a magazine editor in a former life. The sad thing about Bobi Anne was that she always tried so hard to be fashionable and always ended up the complete and total opposite.

Images from Bliss’s last real summer in the Hamptons began to flood her brain. She was an athletic girl, and had spent the three months horseback riding, sailing, playing tennis, learning to surf. She had broken her right wrist again that year. The first three times had been because of sports— skiing, sailing, and tennis. This time she’d fractured it for a stupid Hamptons-style reason. She’d tripped on her new Louboutin platforms and landed on her wrist.

Now that she had answered the first and second questions in detail, she had no choice but to move on to the third. And it was always the third question that was the most difficult to answer.

What happened to me?

Bad things. Terrible things. Bliss felt herself grow cold. It was funny how she could still feel things, how the ghost-memory of being alive and fully aware through each of her senses lingered. She could feel her phantom limbs, and when she slept, she dreamed she was still living an ordinary life: eating chocolates, walking the dog, listening to the sound of the rain as it drummed on the roof, feeling the softness of a cotton pillowcase against her cheek.

But she couldn’t dwell on that. Right now there were things she did not want to remember, but she had to force herself to try.