Gran wasn’t Scarlett…she was Constance.
There was a roaring in my ears, as though the cogs in my mind were spinning at quadruple time, trying to process it all, to make sense of what she’d written.
All these years, and she’d never said a word. Not one. She’d taken her secret to her grave, carried it alone. Or had Grandpa Brian known?
I picked up the fallen page, filed it at the end of the chapter, then shuffled it back into the envelope. Why didn’t she tell me? Why now, when I couldn’t ask?
The seal broke easily on the third envelope, and I nearly ripped the papers in my haste to read them.
My dearest Georgia,
Do you hate me? I wouldn’t blame you. There were certainly days where I hated myself, where I signed her name and felt every inch the fraud I was. But this letter isn’t for me; it’s for you. So allow me to answer the obvious questions.
As we flew over the North Atlantic, William fell asleep, zipped in and warm with Vernon. That’s when the reality of what I’d done hit hard. There were so many ways it could go wrong, and yet I couldn’t come clean, not with William in the balance. It would only be a matter of time before the truth was revealed and I was forced back to England. All I needed was enough time to meet Jameson’s family—to know for certain that William would be in good hands. I had to play the part.
I took paper and pen from the handbag, then bid farewell to Constance, knowing that posting this letter would only serve to help convince my family that William was out of reach.
Two days after we arrived in the States, I posted that letter and stumbled upon a British paper in the lobby of our hotel. It listed the recent casualties from the June air raids. My heart stopped the moment I read Constance Wadsworth listed among the dead. That’s when I remembered that it was my handbag the ambulance drivers had taken with my sister.
Heaven help me, that’s when I realized I could stay with William, not just until he was settled but forever. To my mother, father, and Henry, Constance was dead. No one had challenged it. I was free, but only as Scarlett. My temporary lie became my life.
Vernon took me to immigration, where I was given a new identification card—this time with my picture. My face was still swollen from the bombing, my nose bandaged until the moment the photographer flashed his camera. The other identifying features—the scar and our beauty marks—matched perfectly, as they always had.
Jameson’s family was so warm, so welcoming, even in the face of their unbearable grief. I watched the light slowly die in his mother’s eyes as the months, then the years passed and no news came from the front about Jameson’s disappearance. I didn’t have to feign grief—my sorrow was all too real for the loss of Jameson and Edward, but mostly my sister.
From the moment I was born, she’d been at my side. We’d been educated together, sworn to see the war through together, and yet there I was, raising her son in a foreign country that was now my own, practicing her signature over and over, then burning the pages so no one would be suspicious.
The first real challenge came the day Beatrice asked when I planned to begin writing again. Oh, I looked like my sister and even sounded like her. I knew the most intimate details of her life, but writing…that had never been my talent. Perhaps I should have told them, then, but the fear of being separated from William was more than I could bear. So, I pretended to write when no one was looking. I retyped The Diplomat’s Daughter page by page, fixing grammatical errors and tweaking a few passages so I could honestly say I’d written something in it. I realized that lies were easier when they were based on truth, so I injected truth at every possible turn.
I didn’t submit The Diplomat’s Daughter for publication. Beatrice did the year the war ended. The year we finished the gazebo at the bend in the creek where Jameson asked Scarlett to wait for him. That was the year Beatrice accepted what I’d already known. Jameson wasn’t coming home. I helped build a gazebo for a future that only existed in my imagination, a future where love and tragedy didn’t walk hand in hand.
The problem with signing that first book deal was the request for the second, the third, the fourth. I went through the hatbox, used her partial chapters, her plot notes, and when my own heart failed, I simply imagined she was beside me, hiding in our parents’ house, walking the long roads, sitting at that kitchen table, telling me what happened next. In that way, she lived in every book I typed, then the ones I wrote as the hatbox emptied.
I had the house built big enough for Jameson’s family, and we moved.
Then Brian came along. Oh, Georgia, I fell for his warm eyes and soft smile that very first year he rented the cottage. It wasn’t the same as I’d felt for Edward—that had been a once-in-a-lifetime love—but it was steady, warm, and as gentle as the spring thaw. After Henry…well, I needed gentle.
Beatrice saw. She knew.
William saw it, too. He never voiced his disapproval. Never made me feel guilty. But the year he turned sixteen, he found Brian and me dancing in the gazebo. The phonograph disappeared the next day. He had his father’s smile and his passion for life and his mother’s eyes and steel will. He was the best thing I’d ever done with my life, and the day he married Hannah—the love of his life—he told me it was time to marry mine.
I told him the love of my life had been taken by the war—that was the truth.
He told me Jameson would want me to be happy—that was true, too.
Every year Brian asked. Every year I said no.
Georgia, there exists within me a gray, shadowy place where I am both the girl I was…and the woman I became that day, both Constance and Scarlett. And in that gray place, I was still married to Henry Wadsworth—though he had remarried and moved his new family onto the land I’d ruined myself to protect. The land where he’d buried my sister in his one and only romantic gesture. And perhaps the girl who had been so egregiously abused took a perverse pleasure that she could bring his life toppling down by simply admitting that she was alive.
The woman I was refused to allow the shadow to dim Brian’s light—refused to bring him into a marriage that would ultimately be as fraudulent as I was—but I could never tell him the truth—that would have made him complicit in my crimes. He stopped asking in 1968.
The day I read that Henry Wadsworth had died of a massive stroke, I raced to the veterinary clinic where Brian worked and begged him to ask me again. Only after William had given his blessing did I tell the lawyers to start the paperwork for Jameson.
I married Brian seventeen years after we met, and the decade we were married was the happiest of my life. I found my happily-ever-after. Never doubt that. William and Hannah had tried so long for a child, and Ava was the apple of their eye—and mine. I wish you had known her before the accident, Georgia. Tragedy has a way of breaking gentle things and soldering the shattered pieces together in ways we can’t control. Some, it remakes into stronger, more resilient creatures. In others, the pieces fuse before they heal, leaving only razor-sharp edges. I can offer you no other explanation or excuse for the way she’s cut you over the years.