I somewhat regret that stupid, heedless phone call––but miraculously, it led to me standing here in this house with this man, this child just months away from being born.
I will tell him, I promise.
But you’ll keep my secret for now, won’t you?
I think you will. I trust you.
Here––I’ll even tell you one more secret, for good measure.
When I cut that slit in the back of Ruby’s portrait to hide her letters, I discovered I wasn’t the first person to use it as a hiding spot.
As I’d shoved the papers inside, my fingers had brushed a crinkled piece of newsprint. When I’d pulled it out, it was yellowed with age, the date at the top reading August 18, 1987.
The article that had been carefully clipped out was some fluff piece about a parade in some small Iowa town called Bishop, the faded color photo showing people lined up along a flag-bedecked street as an old car drove by, a beauty queen waving from the back.
I couldn’t figure out why Ruby had cut it out, much less hidden it, but I knew it had been her handiwork. I recognized her elegant, spidery script in the blank space alongside the photo.
F & L (R & G?) she’d written, and then, underneath, a list.
Iowa, 1987
Missouri, 1970–1987
Ohio, 1962–1970
Kentucky, 1960–1962
Before:??
It didn’t make any sense to me, and I’d turned the clipping over in my hand, hoping for more clues, but there was only an ad for the local Ford dealership. I looked more carefully at the picture, studying the beauty queen. She was pretty, her red hair curled back from her face, but there was nothing familiar there, and my eyes drifted to the crowd.
It took awhile—all the faces were a little blurry, and several were wearing sunglasses—but finally, I saw a dark-haired woman standing just at the edge of the photo, her hand shading her eyes.
Mrs. Faith Carter watches the parade with her mother, Mrs. Lydia Hollingsworth.
Faith and Lydia. F & L.
I swear to you, I felt Ruby in that crinkled old piece of newspaper. I could almost see one shiny red nail tapping the picture, and those dark hazel eyes—my eyes—settling on those two women.
There was something familiar about the dark-haired one, something about the way she stood, the set of her shoulders, the slight purse in her lips as she watched the parade.
She looked, I realized with a dawning horror, exactly like Nelle. The older woman at her side—her mother, according to the caption—was taller, her hair twisted into an updo that was old-fashioned even forty years ago, and her hand was resting on her daughter’s arm.
I stared at that picture for a long time, thinking back through everything I’d read about Baby Ruby and her kidnapping. About the nanny, Grace, who had vanished from North Carolina only days after Ruby went missing.
R & G?
In her letters, Ruby had imagined what must have happened to the other Ruby, thinking of that poor baby sent off to find her nanny, searching the woods for Grace, before stepping off a cliff, plunging into all that dark, thick greenery, swallowed up forever.
But maybe …
Maybe there had been another story there all along.
A woman—a girl, really; Grace had been only about twenty—seeing the sickness in Ashby House before anyone else had known to look. A woman who loved a child enough to try to save her from it. Who had found a way to make them both disappear.
Or maybe this was simply another fantasy of Ruby’s. Nothing more than a delusional hunch, a wish that the real Ruby, Dora Darnell’s spiritual twin, had been a fighter, too. That she had, perhaps, survived.
In any case, it was another one of Ruby’s many secrets.
One I decided to keep.
Well, except from you.
That piece of newspaper is still there in the painting, wrapped gently in all of Ruby’s letters, and I think about it every time I look into the eyes Andrew Miller so lovingly painted all those years ago.
The love of his life.
And his doom.
Here’s one final secret for you.
Sometimes, when I look up at Ruby’s portrait, I think about how happy she was when it was painted. She thought she’d beaten it then, the dark thing that was lurking inside her.
She thought it could be that easy.
And I think about me and Cam, how happy we are.
How easy it is to think the darkness has been exorcised from us both.
Even though Cam pressed a pillow down on his mother’s face until she stopped moving.
Even though I swung that poker at Ben without one second of hesitation.
Were we forced into the role of murderer? Did we have any other choice?
I think I know the answers, but sometimes …
Sometimes I lie awake at night, our child kicking inside me, half him, half me, and remember that Cam and I are both Ruby’s heirs.
Me by blood, him by a different, but no less powerful bond.
And I wonder.
* * *
I WONDER.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Camden McTavish might bristle at being called “The Luckiest Boy in North Carolina,” but thanks to the amazing team I get to work with on these books, I wear the title “The Luckiest Girl in Alabama” very proudly!
Ruby really put me through the wringer, and I would not have made it through without the guidance of my brilliant editor, Sarah Cantin. Thank you as always for your instinctive understanding of these absolutely wild plots I come up with, and thank you for always pushing me and the book to be as good as we can be.
Thank you also to Drue VanDuker for your sharp eye, smart notes, and truly excellent author care!
I am beyond lucky to have found a publishing home at St. Martin’s Press, and I am so grateful to everyone there. Jennifer Enderlin, Kejana Ayala, Marissa Sangiacomo, Jessica Zimmerman, thank you so much for all you do for me and these books.
I also owe a special thanks to the team over at Macmillan Audio. Mary Beth, Robert, Drew, and Emily, it was so lovely to get to spend time in the booth and to see all the work that goes into making these stories as fun to listen to as they are to read!
How delighted it makes me to thank Holly Root for the seventeenth time! As I’ve said before, and will no doubt say again, landing you as an agent was the luckiest break I ever got in this biz. Thank you also to Alyssa Maltese, for all that you do for so many authors. You’re the best!
Thanks to Heather Baror-Shapiro and her team, for helping these unhinged stories find homes all over the world, and thank you as well to Jon Cassir and Berni Barta over at CAA, who work to get these unhinged stories on your TVs/movie screens!
To my family, friends, and cats, thank you for literally everything. All of it.
And to my readers: This year was the first time I really got to get back out on the road and meet so many of you, and I hadn’t realized just how much I’d missed that—missed y’all. Thank you, thank you, thank you. When you buy one of my books, you aren’t just spending your money. You’re also giving me your time, and that’s the most precious commodity we have. It’s an honor to get to entertain you for a few hours, and I hope I’ve made time in waiting rooms, during hours on flights, or a just a simple boring afternoon go by a little faster and a little more enjoyably.