The Things We Leave Unfinished Yarros, Rebecca (reading like a writer .TXT) 📖

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