Chapter 1 - The Bedroom of a Dead Girl
My mother pressed both hands against my locked bedroom door and whispered, "I still can't bear to open it."
Her future in-law held a framed photograph of a flowering dogwood tree.
A brass plate beneath the photograph showed two dates.
The second date was eight years ago.
That was the moment I realized the dead girl was me.
I stood barefoot in the darkness at the opposite end of the hallway, one hand clamped over my mouth.
Mom didn't see me.
Neither did Mrs. Holloway, the mother of my brother Nathan's fiancée.
I had entered through the side door fifteen minutes earlier, using a key my parents apparently had forgotten I still possessed. I wasn't there to confront anyone. I wasn't even supposed to stay long.
I needed medication I'd accidentally left behind during my latest forced weekend away.
That was all.
Get in.
Get it.
Get out.
I'd performed some version of that routine for eight years.
Whenever Nathan's fiancée, Claire, visited with her family, my mother called me.
Sometimes she gave me several days' warning.
Sometimes she gave me an hour.
"Anastasia, Claire's parents are coming this weekend."
I knew what that meant.
"Where am I supposed to go?"
"Anywhere."
Then Mom would soften her voice as though kindness could erase humiliation.
"Please don't make this difficult."
Dad never bothered with the soft voice.
"Just disappear for the weekend."
Disappear.
That word had become the unofficial Dunaway family solution to me.
I had been eighteen when my life cracked open.
I'd spent a brief period receiving psychiatric care after struggling badly during my first year out of high school. It had been frightening and humiliating enough without my family treating it like a stain that could spread by proximity.
I recovered.
I worked.
I took my medication.
I built routines.
I got a job at Bellweather Nursery because plants made sense to me in a way people sometimes didn't.
A damaged root could heal.
A tree leaning toward darkness could be turned toward sunlight.
Nobody whispered about a flower's worst year.
But my parents never seemed to understand that recovery meant I had recovered.
To them, eighteen-year-old Anastasia remained frozen in time.
A family embarrassment.
Something to hide.
At least, that was what I'd believed.
Until tonight.
Mrs. Holloway touched my mother's shoulder.
"Margaret, you don't have to do this."
Mom dabbed her eyes with a tissue.
"I know."
"Then let's go downstairs."
Mom looked at my bedroom door.
The deadbolt gleamed beneath the hallway light.
A deadbolt.
On the outside.
I'd noticed it before, but Mom had claimed Dad installed it because they stored valuables in my room whenever I was gone.
I'd actually believed her.
Now Mom rested her fingertips against the wood.
"I still cannot bear to turn the knob," she whispered. "It's exactly as she left it."
Mrs. Holloway lowered her head.
"Claire told me Nathan almost canceled the wedding after what happened."
My pulse stumbled.
What happened?
Nathan hadn't canceled anything because of me.
Nathan barely spoke to me.
Mom's face crumpled beautifully.
Perfectly.
I'd seen my mother cry before.
This was different.
This was practiced grief.
"He adored his sister," Mom whispered.
I nearly laughed.
It would have been the wrong sound.
The kind of sound that would have exposed me instantly.
Nathan had spent eight years participating in my exile.
Whenever Claire visited, he never objected.
He never said, She's my sister. She stays.
Once, when I asked why Claire couldn't simply know I existed, Nathan had stared at his phone and said, "Why can't you just let me have one uncomplicated thing?"
Uncomplicated.
Apparently my existence was a complication.
Mrs. Holloway sighed.
"I can't imagine losing a daughter so young."
My knees weakened.
Losing.
A daughter.
So young.
Mom bowed her head.
"Some mornings, I still expect to hear her walking downstairs."
That did it.
I backed silently into the small linen alcove before my legs gave out.
My mother had not told Claire's family I was an executive in Atlanta.
That was the story she'd told me.
I'd asked her once, years earlier.
"What exactly do they think I do?"
"Consulting," Mom had answered.
"What kind?"
"Does it matter?"
Apparently it didn't.
Because there was no executive.
No Atlanta.
No consulting career.
There was a dead daughter.
Me.
Footsteps sounded downstairs.
Dad's voice carried faintly upward.
"Margaret?"
Mom straightened immediately.
She pressed the tissue beneath her eyes.
"We should go."
Mrs. Holloway nodded.
They walked toward the staircase.
Mom passed within twelve feet of where I stood hidden.
I watched the woman who gave birth to me descend the stairs while another woman rubbed her back because she believed Mom was grieving my death.
Neither of them looked behind them.
A minute later, the front door closed.
I waited.
Five minutes.
Then ten.
My legs trembled when I stepped from the alcove.
The hallway looked exactly as it always had.
Family photographs.
Cream walls.
The ridiculous antique table Dad wouldn't let anyone touch.
Nathan's graduation portrait.
Mom and Dad's anniversary photograph.
But now I noticed something I'd somehow missed for years.
There wasn't a single photograph of me.
Not one.
I approached my bedroom.
My hand hovered over the knob.
I remembered being twelve and painting that room yellow.
I remembered Nathan throwing a baseball through the window and blaming me.
I remembered studying there.
Crying there.
Recovering there.
Living there.
Mom had transformed it into something else.
I unlocked the deadbolt.
The door opened.
The lamp beside my bed was already on.
For one surreal second, I expected to find another version of myself sitting there.
Instead, everything was preserved.
My old quilt.
My books.
My high school yearbook.
A stuffed rabbit I'd had since childhood.
But everything was too neat.
Curated.
This wasn't a bedroom anymore.
It was an exhibit.
Then I saw the table.
White flowers surrounded a framed photograph.
My breath caught.
I recognized the photograph immediately.
A dogwood tree stood beneath spring sunlight, its branches covered in white blossoms.
I'd sold that tree.
Three months earlier.
Claire had walked into Bellweather Nursery on a Tuesday afternoon wearing a green sweater and carrying a church committee folder.
I recognized her from Nathan's social media photographs.
She didn't recognize me.
Of course she didn't.
She smiled and asked, "Could you help me choose a memorial tree?"
I nearly dropped the watering wand.
"For whom?"
"A relative of my fiancé."
She'd smiled sadly.
"His sister."
I remembered gripping the counter.
"What happened?"
Claire's face softened.
"She died young. I never got to meet her."
My heart had pounded, but I forced myself to keep working.
I'd helped Claire choose a dogwood.
I'd written the care instructions myself.
I'd even tied the tag around the trunk.
That same tree now appeared in the photograph inside my bedroom.
My fingers went numb.
Then I looked below it.
Granite.
Gray.
Polished.
Engraved.
IN LOVING MEMORY OF ANASTASIA DUNAWAY.
1995 – 2014.
I touched my name.
Cold stone beneath warm fingertips.
I was twenty-seven years old.
According to that stone, I'd died at nineteen.
Eight years ago.
Exactly when my family started making me disappear.
I sank onto the edge of the bed.
Everything rearranged itself inside my head.
The weekends away.
The lies.
The missing photographs.
The strange way neighbors sometimes looked at me when I came home late.
Nathan refusing to introduce me to Claire.
Mom insisting I use the side entrance whenever guests were present.
Dad telling me never to answer the home phone.
It wasn't shame.
It was logistics.
They weren't hiding an embarrassing daughter.
They were maintaining a death.
My stomach turned.
I stared at the stone until the letters blurred.
Then something inside me changed.
The grief didn't disappear.
It hardened.
I stood.
I opened my desk drawer.
My birth certificate was gone.
So was my Social Security card.
I checked the filing cabinet.
Empty.
Then I remembered Dad's office.
I crossed the hallway.
His desk was locked.
For the first time in my life, I didn't care.
I pulled the spare key from the ceramic dish where Mom always hid it.
The drawer opened.
Inside was a folder.
My name was written across it.
ANASTASIA.
I reached for it.
Then headlights swept across the upstairs wall.
A car had entered the driveway.
I froze.
The front door opened downstairs.
May you like
And my mother's voice called into the silent house.
"Anastasia?"
