July 11, Thursday

I STUDIED the photos I'd taken of the headstones of the Whisper family. Some of them dated back to the late 1800s. Before Rose, the most recent deaths were of a man named Charles and a woman named Sophia. The age of the couple was right for them to be Rose's parents and considering the proximity of her unmarked plot to theirs, it made sense. Then I realized the dates of death for Charles and Sophia were the same—a tragic car accident, maybe? The year would've meant Rose was only seventeen or eighteen when her parents had died.

My heart squeezed for her loss. I'd lost my father when I was fourteen and at times I still missed him so much I didn't think I could stand it.

Armed with new names and dates, I went back to the internet to search for more information. I found a tiny article on the deaths of two locals, Charles and Sophia Whisper, in a tragic car accident near their home in Irving, Alabama. Their teenaged daughter Rose had survived the crash.

And I found the obituary for Rose Whisper. There was no cause of death listed, only that there would be a private memorial service at a future date.

My phone buzzed and I looked down to see my mother's glamourous headshot on the screen. I winced, but realized I had to talk to her sooner or later. And hopefully, she was on a luxury schooner somewhere, calling me from a satellite phone, blissfully unaware that my life had exploded.

I connected the call. "Hi, Mom."

"Josephine, what the fuck happened with Curtis?"

I winced. The cat was out of the bag. "Um, we broke up."

"Broke up? That's putting it mildly. It sounds like the man took you for every-fucking-thing you had. Well, I hope you don't expect me to support you."

Like a lot of British people, my mother used the eff word as a noun, verb, adverb, adjective, and gerund. "Of course not. I'll be fine."

"You couldn't have given me a heads up? I have to be fucking blindsided on a zoom interview with Anderson Cooper that my daughter was taken in by a fucking con man?"

"I'm sorry, Mother. I didn't want to interrupt your vacation."

"I knew that man couldn't be trusted. He was too young and too fucking handsome for you."

What could I say? Hadn't I thought the same thing a thousand times?

"Don't let this affect your writing."

I already had. "I won't."

"The book industry is in fucking freefall, even for the pornography end of the business that you write for. You can't give your editor a reason to cancel your contract."

I bit my tongue, hard. "I won't."

"I'll be in New York in two weeks. I'll hook you up with a publicist who'll start a smear campaign against fucking Curtis."

I grimaced. "I don't want that. And I'm not in New York. I left to allow everything to quiet down."

"Not in New York? Where are you? Los Angeles? Chicago?"

"Um, Irving, Alabama."

"Alabama? Is this a fucking joke?"

"Um, no. I'm staying in a house in a rural area to finish my book." I scrambled for words to make the situation sound better than it was. "It's like a retreat."

"Oh. Well, that doesn't sound too bad, I suppose. How is the book coming along?"

"Great," I lied.

"When is your deadline?"

Two months ago. "Not for a while yet."

"It's a good thing you can write those smutty books quickly. You'd be in trouble if you were writing in a category as demanding as mine."

"I know," I said agreeably. "Where are you?"

"In Venice. And I have to go. I'm having dinner on a TV producer's yacht."

Of course she was. "Sounds fantastic. Take care, Mom."

"Goodbye, Josephine."

The call ended and my mother's photo disappeared from the screen. Such a metaphor. Things had gone about the way I thought they would. I exhaled and set aside the phone, then turned back to the information on my laptop screen.

In the article and in Rose's obituary, there was no mention of other family members. It made me wonder if after the accident Rose had returned to the huge house to live alone.

And if the remote solitude had helped her recover… or had made things worse.