“None taken,” I say, but I can hardly hear him over the ringing in my ears.
Eddie put me in his will.
Did he think Bea might get out one day? That she’d kill him? Was this his way of preemptively saying sorry, or was it just another play in their sick game? A way of putting her own fortune out of her reach, by giving it to me?
I’ll never know.
“In any case, he had control over all of Bea’s finances after she disappeared. Her shares in the company, all of that. And now,” he says, handing a thick leather portfolio across the desk to me, “it’s yours.”
My fingers are numb as I place it in my lap, feeling the weight of it on my legs.
“The company is yours as well, of course,” he goes on, writing something on a legal pad. “Southern Manors. You can keep it, or—”
“I can sell it, right?”
Mr. Lloyd’s eyes meet mine across the desk, and his lips twitch slightly. “It’s yours,” he repeats.
I sit there, holding this, holding everything, and for a moment, I think about what it would be like to keep it. To run Southern Manors, to buy a new house in Thornfield Estates.
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 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.
ALSO BY RACHEL HAWKINS
Hex Hall
Demonglass
Spell Bound
School Spirits
Rebel Belle
Miss Mayhem
Lady Renegades
Journey’s End
Ruby and Olivia
Prince Charming
Her Royal Highness
About the Author
RACHEL HAWKINS is the New York Times bestselling author of eleven books for young readers, and her work has been published in more than a dozen countries. She studied gender and sexuality in Victorian literature at Auburn University and currently lives in Alabama. The Wife Upstairs is her first adult novel. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Part I: Jane
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part II: Bea
Part III: Jane
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part IV: Bea
Part V: Jane
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Part VI: Bea
Part VII: Jane
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Part VIII: Bea
Part IX: Jane
Chapter 30
Part X: Eddie
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Part XI: Jane
Chapter 35
Part XII: Bea
Chapter 36
Part XIII: Jane
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Also by Rachel Hawkins
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
First published in the United States by St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group
THE WIFE UPSTAIRS. Copyright © 2020 by Rachel Hawkins. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.
www.stmartins.com
Cover designed by Danielle Christopher
Cover art: flowers © Nadezhda Stepanova/Getty Images; background texture © Photo Boutique/Shutterstock.com; torn paper © Cafe Racer/Shutterstock.com; bannister © TaraPatta/Shutterstock.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Hawkins, Rachel, 1979- author.
Title: The wife upstairs / Rachel Hawkins.
Description: First edition. | New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2021.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020035334 | ISBN 9781250245496 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250276100 (Canadian) | ISBN 9781250245519 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Love stories.
Classification: LCC PS3608.A893463 W54 2021 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035334
eISBN 9781250245519
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First U.S. Edition: 2021
First Canadian Edition: 2021