protect him.
She lifted her chin, adjusted William on her hip, and opened the handbag with trembling fingers to find the visa she’d packed this morning. The damage to her face was, in its own way, now a blessing. She handed the papers to the officer, showing him the scar on her palm that matched the description. Then she pressed a kiss to William’s forehead and silently begged his forgiveness.
“I’m Scarlett Stanton.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Georgia
“Oh my God,” I whispered, the last page fluttering to the floor between my feet. My breath came in a stuttered gasp as a pair of tears splattered on the paper.
Gran wasn’t Scarlett…she was Constance.
There was a roaring in my ears, as though the cogs in my mind were spinning at quadruple time, trying to process it all, to make sense of what she’d written.
All these years, and she’d never said a word. Not one. She’d taken her secret to her grave, carried it alone. Or had Grandpa Brian known?
I picked up the fallen page, filed it at the end of the chapter, then shuffled it back into the envelope. Why didn’t she tell me? Why now, when I couldn’t ask?
The seal broke easily on the third envelope, and I nearly ripped the papers in my haste to read them.
My dearest Georgia,
Do you hate me? I wouldn’t blame you. There were certainly days where I hated myself, where I signed her name and felt every inch the fraud I was. But this letter isn’t for me; it’s for you. So allow me to answer the obvious questions.
As we flew over the North Atlantic, William fell asleep, zipped in and warm with Vernon. That’s when the reality of what I’d done hit hard. There were so many ways it could go wrong, and yet I couldn’t come clean, not with William in the balance. It would only be a matter of time before the truth was revealed and I was forced back to England. All I needed was enough time to meet Jameson’s family—to know for certain that William would be in good hands. I had to play the part.
I took paper and pen from the handbag, then bid farewell to Constance, knowing that posting this letter would only serve to help convince my family that William was out of reach.
Two days after we arrived in the States, 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