Page 101 of The Wife Upstairs
But no.
I see this for what it is—a gift. From Eddie. From Bea.
In exchange for keeping their secrets, they’ll give me this.
And I will fucking take it.
I open the folder and stare at the paper in my hands. It’s mostly legal jargon, and of course Jane Bell isn’t even my real name, but none of that matters. All I’m looking at are the numbers.
It’s all of it, I can tell. Bea’s entire fortune, everything she built with Southern Manors, left to Eddie who then left it to me.
I’m rich.
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 impendinglate-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.
