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“Amy, you really are acting very strange. All of the men in my family are doctors. It’s sort of a family tradition and has been for, oh, a few hundred years now. I can’t vouch for what kind of doctors my ancestors back in England were. They probably did bloodletting and used lots of leeches.”
“Your brothers are doctors?” she whispered. “Your beer-drinking, thrill-a-minute brothers are doctors?”
Stephen gave a sigh. “You know all this. Okay, so maybe it’s like one of your books. My three brothers are all doctors and they travel all over the world. They h
elicopter in, climb mountains. If there’s a disaster in the world, you can bet that one of my brothers will be there. They like excitement as much as they like life.”
“Children? Wives?”
“Lots. There are so many ex-wives and children and stepchildren and half siblings that I can’t keep track of them. But you’ve always been able to. Every year, you put on a Thanksgiving dinner for about fifty. You know all their names and relationships and you send them birthday gifts.”
“I hope I can live up to my reputation,” she said. The truth was that so much was swirling around in her mind that she couldn’t seem to grasp it all. Tristan, doctors; doctors, Tristan. And she had changed her life. No, she’d changed Stephen’s life. Somehow, her going back to one of Stephen’s ancestors and saving his life, and, through Faith, introducing him to medicine, had filtered down through the centuries so that it was now a “tradition” in Stephen’s family that all of them were doctors.
She had done exactly what she’d hoped to. She looked at Stephen. “Are you ready to go to bed?”
“Yeah,” he said, then gave her a look that let her know what he had in mind.
At least some things haven’t changed, she thought.
“I have to make one call, then I’ll be up.”
“Okay,” Amy said as she started for the door, then she turned back. “Did you say ‘your books’? As in my books?”
“Sure.” He was looking down at the mail again. “Your books. The ones you write out there in your studio.”
His words put Amy in such a state of shock that she couldn’t say anything. She went to the kitchen, to the back door, and turned on the outside lights. There, at the back of their three-acre property, was what looked to be a little Victorian house. Beside the door were hooks with keys on them. The only one she didn’t know had a key chain that said it was good to be queen. Amy knew that that was hers.
She took the key and went out to the house. She wasn’t surprised to see that it was very much like the one in Maine owned by Primrose and Madame Zoya. When she opened the door, she smiled. The living room, down to the last fabric, was a duplicate of the room where she’d had tea with Primrose. Through an archway was another room and it was an exact copy of the room at the store where she’d found the book about the Hawthorne family. The only other room was the “with plumbing” one, the bathroom with a kitchenette in front of it. The bathroom countertop was covered with blue bottles and jars that said “Indigo.”
She went back to the living room. In a bookcase to the right of the door, she found what she was looking for. There were eight books there with the author’s name as Amy Hawthorne. Quickly, she read the blurbs and saw that they were books set in the eighteenth century. Inside were reprints of some reviews. One of them said that Amy’s descriptions of the time period were so vivid that it was as though she’d been there.
She looked around the beautiful studio, and as she did, memory seemed to flood into her mind. It was like when she’d suddenly found herself in the eighteenth century. She had been a newcomer there, yet she knew people and places.
She took one of the books with her name on it, her pen name, and held it to her. Yes, she was beginning to remember writing it, and even remember how many weeks it had spent on the New York Times Bestseller List. She glanced down and saw that the hero’s name was Tristan.
When she looked back at the fireplace, she saw a portrait over the mantel. She knew where to turn on the light above the mantel. There was a portrait of Tristan, smiling at her in the way she’d seen a hundred times. The signature on the picture was, of course, Zoë’s name.
“They knew about my books,” Amy whispered. “They knew all the time.” She smiled in memory of the way Zoë and Faith had kept secret what they must have known about her. In their relived lives, they’d seen her books on the stands, and Zoë had painted a portrait of Tristan and sent it to her. Amy looked at the little brass plaque on the bottom of the frame. It said “Nathaniel Hawthorne” and she laughed at the lie.
She had not only changed Stephen’s life but her own as well. Maybe it was because in this second life her husband had a job that he was happy with, and it had released something inside her so she felt confident enough to write down the stories that ran through her head.
“I thought you wanted to go to bed,” Stephen said from the doorway. “Don’t tell me you’re out here drooling over that guy again.”
“I never drool,” she said.
“Ha! I’ve never been jealous of any man except him,” he said as he put his arms around her. “Sometimes I think that if he walked into this room you’d leave with him.”
“Of course I wouldn’t,” she said as he bent to kiss her, and she knew that they’d never make it to the bedroom. “I would choose you over him.”
As Stephen pushed her shirt off her shoulder, Amy glanced up at Tristan’s portrait and she could swear he winked at her. She winked back, then gave her attention to her husband.
