They crept up the stairs in the dark. She gave Ellie a nightgown and toothbrush, and she retreated to the bathroom for such a long time Anna feared she’d passed out. When at last she emerged, they crammed themselves into Anna’s twin bed. Ellie was trembling. Anna thought she was cold, or frightened.
“Shh, it’s okay. You’re safe. I’m here.” She wrapped her arms around her friend and drifted off, listening to her breathing. When she woke up in the night, the breathing had stopped. Ellie was gone.
Had the overdose been deliberate? Did it matter?
The horrific shock of awakening with a corpse in her arms remains seared into her memory.
What happened afterward, mercifully, has been lost—her brain protecting her from the overwhelming trauma of what she’d done.
There are snippets.
Finding the gun.
Pop! Pop! Pop!
Watching bloody water swirl into the drain.
Putting on Ellie’s clothes.
Burying the gun and key in the box that held fragments of their old lives, their real lives, before they became the Toskas.
She found a pay phone and made a call.
That grounded her again, the sound of her father’s voice allowing her to find her own, to convey information, to stifle incrimination.
“They’re dead, Daddy. Dead in their beds.”
“Your mother? Stanislav?”
“Yes, and my friend . . . Ellie. She was staying with us. They must have thought she was me.”
Oh, Ellie.
“Then . . . no one knows you’re alive?”
No one would ever know, not even the authorities.
As she made the long bus journey to the West Coast, her father, tethered to the ruse that was her lifeline, flew to New York to identify the bodies. He confirmed that the three victims were Anna, Lena, and Stanislav.
Back in California, he introduced his daughter to his new wife, Teddy.
“Call her Nora. That’s what she’s chosen.”
Ellie . . . Nora.
Forget-me-not . . .
Memento mori . . .
She’s spent most of her life remembering death. Remembering that she must die.
That she did die.
But until it’s her turn to spend eternity in a grave that bears someone else’s name, she’s going to remember that she must live.
Live for the family she’d lost and for the family she’s created. Live for the little girl whose life was destroyed and imperiled, for the young woman who’d done what she had to do to survive, and for the daughters who will never look into their own mother’s eyes and see murderous madness. Live with the lies she has to keep from the people she loves most and with the truth she can begin to tell at last.
“Mom? Are you . . . were you . . . ?”
“Yes.”
She pulls her daughter into a fierce embrace, and she utters the words that have echoed in her mind every day, every moment, for twenty-five years.
Aloud at last; allowed at last.
“I was Anna.”
Acknowledgments
With gratitude to Lucia Macro, Liate Stehlik, Lyssa Keusch, Emily Krump, Asanté Simons, Amy Halperin, and the team at William Morrow; Laura Blake Peterson, Holly Frederick, James Farrell, and the team at Curtis Brown, Limited; copy editor Gina Macedo; Carol and Greg Fitzgerald and the team at The Book Report Network; those who read the manuscript in various stages, helped me answer questions large and small, or otherwise lent support: Jackie Brilliant, Kyle Cadley, Greg Herren, Maureen Martin, Suzanne Schmidt, Mark Staub, and Veronica Taglia. Especially to Alison Gaylin, who read the earliest draft and buoyed me to keep going, and Brody Staub, who when I told him the premise, tilted his head and said, “What if you twist it so that . . . ?”
About the Author
New York Times and USA Today bestselling author WENDY CORSI STAUB has published more than ninety novels over a twenty-eight-year career, under her own name and various pseudonyms, including Wendy Markham. She’s been honored five times with the Westchester Library Association and Washington Irving Prize for Fiction and is a three-time finalist for the Mary Higgins Clark Award. She lives in the New York City suburbs with her husband, sons, and cats.
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