The Wife Upstairs(82)

Not just a little rich, either. This is millions. Hundreds of millions.

Signed over to me.

I raise my eyes to the lawyer’s, and I don’t have to fake the tears. They’re already there, but they’re tears of relief, not sadness. Tears of fucking joy. Bea Rochester has handed a life to me. Not her life, not “Jane Bell’s” life, but something new, something fresh.

Something I can make all mine.

“It’s all been such a shock,” I say quietly. “Everything with Eddie. I loved him, I really did, but I had no idea…”

I look back to my lap, my throat working. “I didn’t know you could love someone, but also not know them at all.”

“Honey, it seems like none of us knew Eddie Rochester,” Mr. Lloyd says, reaching across the desk to pat my hand, his class ring heavy and cold.

When I walk outside, the wind has picked up, clouds moving quickly across the sky. The air feels thick and heavy with an impending late-summer storm, and I pull my umbrella from my purse even as I tilt my face toward the first few fat drops of rain.

The smile that spreads across my face hurts my cheeks. It probably looks stupid, too, a wide, childlike grin, but for the first time in a long time, I don’t think about how other people might see me. I’m not tailoring my reaction for someone else.

I’m free.

Bea and her money have set me free.

Free to leave Alabama, free to use my real name again if I want to. Because the kind of money I have now is the perfect wall against the past.

I can be Helen Burns again if I want to. I can be Jane Bell forever if I want to.

I can be anyone.





Epilogue





I wonder about them sometimes. Eddie and Bea.

Once, as I was loading groceries into my trunk, I thought I saw them.

It couldn’t have been them, of course. By then, I’d left Mountain Brook behind me. Left the whole state of Alabama. I’d used Bea’s money to buy myself a little place—nothing as crazy as what I could’ve afforded, but still—my own small, cozy cabin in the mountains of North Carolina.

Turns out I liked the South.

But there was no way the woman in the sunglasses in the big SUV that cruised past the Ingles Market parking lot could’ve been Bea, no way the figure slumped in the passenger seat was Eddie. I couldn’t even tell if it was a man, after all.

Adele had been in the car, and she’d given a short, sharp bark at the car as it passed, and I thought the person in the passenger seat had turned a little to look back, but they were too far away by then for me to be sure.

That was only a few months after the fire, though, so I’d been jumpier, primed to see ghosts everywhere.

I sometimes think I might always be looking over my shoulder.

I remind myself that when Bea opened the door to the panic room, there was a whoosh and a wall of flame. I remember the scent of burned hair, and a worse, darker scent, disturbingly like barbecue.

I remember that they found Eddie’s teeth.

But I also remember those teeth flying out of his mouth when I hit him, and so …

I wonder.

I like to think that they both survived. That they’re out there somewhere.

Maybe they’ve gone back to Hawaii. Or a more remote island, their own little beach somewhere.

I picture them on white sand, palm trees swaying overhead, just like I used to picture them when Bea was a ghost and Eddie was mine.

She sits there, smiling in the sunshine, her glossy hair pulled back from her face. Eddie is next to her. Not nearly as handsome as he once was.

I see Bea reach for his hand, see his fingers—thick with scars, raised red welts crisscrossing his skin—curl around hers.

We’re together now, she’ll say to him, that’s all that matters. Not the money, not the life they’d built, not the house that’s now just a black mark on all that green, green grass at Thornfield Estates.

And it won’t be a lie when she says that they’re better off now without all that, better off just the two of them, wherever they are.

It’ll be the truth.





Acknowledgments


I am always grateful to my agent, Holly Root, but especially grateful when it comes to this project. Holly, thank you for always seeing my potential and knowing my writerly heart better than I do sometimes.

Thanks also to Josh Bank, Joelle Hobeika, and Sara Shandler at Alloy Entertainment for this opportunity and for truly changing the way I write. It was such a joy to work with all of you!

To the entire team at St. Martin’s including Sarah Bonamino, Sallie Lotz, Naureen Nashid, Marissa Sangiacomo, and Jessica Zimmerman. You’re all rock stars, and Bea would snatch y’all up for Southern Manors in a heartbeat.

Obscene levels of thanks to Sarah Cantin for getting this book from the word go and then making it so, so much better! It’s such a joy to work with someone who is both a razor-sharp editor and a wonderful advocate for the book, and I have appreciated it more than I can say.

As always, thanks to my family. None of this is any fun without y’all.

And lastly, thanks to every woman who ever got to the end of Jane Eyre and thought, “Honestly, Jane? You could do better.”

You are my people, and I love you.