by Alison Grey
Contents
Also by Alison Grey
PART ONE: THE INVITE
Prologue
1. BROOKE
2. SHERIDAN
3. AMANDA
4. HOLLIS
5. BROOKE
6. SHERIDAN
7. AMANDA
8. HOLLIS
PART TWO: COLLEGE DAYS
9. SHERIDAN
10. AMANDA
11. HOLLIS
12. BROOKE
13. SHERIDAN
14. AMANDA
PART THREE: BEFORE THE REUNION
15. HOLLIS
16. BROOKE
17. SHERIDAN
18. AMANDA
PART FOUR: JUNIOR YEAR
19. HOLLIS
20. BROOKE
21. AMANDA
22. SHERIDAN
23. AMANDA
24. HOLLIS
25. BROOKE
26. AMANDA
27. SHERIDAN
28. HOLLIS
29. BROOKE
30. AMANDA
31. SHERIDAN
32. HOLLIS
33. AMANDA
34. BROOKE
35. SHERIDAN
36. HOLLIS
37. AMANDA
38. SHERIDAN
39. HOLLIS
40. BROOKE
41. AMANDA
42. SHERIDAN
43. HOLLIS
44. BROOKE
45. AMANDA
46. SHERIDAN
47. HOLLIS
48. BROOKE
PART FIVE: SENIOR YEAR AND GRADUATION
49. AMANDA
50. HOLLIS
51. SHERIDAN
52. HOLLIS
53. AMANDA
54. SHERIDAN
55. BROOKE
56. HOLLIS
57. AMANDA
58. SHERIDAN
59. BROOKE
60. HOLLIS
61. SHERIDAN
62. HOLLIS
63. BROOKE
64. SHERIDAN
PART SIX: REUNION WEEKEND
65. AMANDA
66. SHERIDAN
67. HOLLIS
68. BROOKE
EPILOGUE: AMANDA
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright © 2019 by Alison Grey
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Also by Alison Grey
CAN’T LET GO
WHO SHE BECAME
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For Mary Julia Baldwin
Jealousy and love are sisters.
Russian Proverb
PART ONE: THE INVITE
Prologue
I’ve been dreaming about the sound a body makes when it falls from the top of a six-story building.
I used to dream about it every night. I’d wake up screaming, shaking, gasping for the breath I’d been holding in my sleep. Lovers would hold me, ask me what’s wrong: “You were having a nightmare. Come back to bed.”
I have shared my body many times since that night, but I’ve never shared the truth about what happened.
How could anyone understand what it’s like to both love and hate someone enough to push them off a building? How could they grasp how it’s possible to be both sickened and yet aroused at the sound of bones, muscle, and blood smacking the concrete?
We are taught love is an absolute.
I know all too well that it’s not.
Because the darkest of my secrets is this: You think I’m having a nightmare.
I’m here to tell you this: I’m reliving a cherished memory.
I’m screaming because I’m awake.
I’m shaking because I can’t go back and kill her again.
One
BROOKE
Hollis was the first one to get her letter.
Which, to anyone who knew Hollis, was not a surprise. Hollis Cobb had always been the girl to get everything first. It’s what defined her life and what defined her place in our group of friends.
You might finally get something you’d wanted, but Hollis always had it before you did.
“Did you get it?” she’d asked me on the phone that afternoon in January. The holidays had barely finished. My Christmas tree was still up, something Hollis would have admonished me for if she’d known. But unlike Hollis, I took down my own decorations. I didn’t hire people to do it for me.
It was easy to have your life together when you could outsource the bullshit.
“Get what?” I replied, cradling my phone between my ear and shoulder as I huffed and puffed down the stairs of my townhouse, a full plastic clothes basket in my arms. The mushroomy, stale odor of dirty socks and boxer briefs wafted in the air in my wake, making me queasy.
I really needed to teach these kids how to do their own laundry.
“Clearly you didn’t, or you’d know what I was talking about,” Hollis sighed on the other end. “The invite to reunion weekend.”
“Oh, that,” I replied, dropping the plastic tub of clothes on the tile floor of my laundry room, startling our cat, Plymouth, who had been napping inside the open dryer again. He ran away as I threw open the washing machine. “No, I haven’t. Why?”
There was nothing all that special about a college reunion invite. We had them every year, though my group of friends from those days tended to only go to the ones every 5 years. I’d skipped the 5th year one, due to being knocked up. I’d gone to the 10th year one and had a fine enough time. The photos and memories of it were buried somewhere on my Facebook page.
This year would be the 15th, nothing I found particularly noteworthy.
I felt like I must be missing something, because Hollis was clearly anxious. Also, she never called me. Texts and Instagram DMs were how we tended to communicate.
“The sponsor for our class this year,” she answered. I could hear her exhaling.
“Are you smoking?” I asked, knowing I sounded shrill.
“Who cares?” Hollis snapped back. “Why do you always focus on the wrong things? Jesus Christ, Brooke.”
I closed my eyes and took a breath. I’d done this thousands of times over the years with Hollis. She tested my nerves and the older I got, the less I felt like taking her shit and showing her grace.
But I still did. Even when it was very hard.
Its why she’d called me, after all. No one else was as patient with her as I was.
“Okay,” I said, flatly. “Who is the sponsor?”
“The Brentmore Hotel,” she said.
Oh.
Now it made sense why she’d called and why she was smoking after quitting over ten years ago.
I walked out of the laundry room, through the kitchen, and into the family room. I needed a place to sit down.
Hollis was silent on the other end. She had to know I was collecting my thoughts after that kind of news.
“Why would they sponsor a reunion,” I said. It wasn’t a question because I knew Hollis would never have the answer to it, because it made absolutely no sense. I was just thinking out loud, the way you can only do with your very closest friends.
“No idea,” Hollis said. “But apparently they’re specifically sponsoring the Class of 2003 r
eunion. The entire weekend and every event, luncheon, and meeting will be held at The Brentmore.”
I stared at the black screen of my television, noting my reflection looking back at me. I looked terrified.
Which made sense.
Because I was.
Two
SHERIDAN
I, like most children, was thrilled to receive mail when I was a kid. Our mailbox was a half mile down the road from the main house, a lane lined with beautiful live oaks that lent our home the feeling of an estate more than just a house. It was my job to check that mailbox when I got off the school bus. Mama didn’t like walking that far if she could help it. She’d rather lay in our sitting room with her feet up, TV on, watching Erica Kane and the rest of the glamorous people of Pine Valley.
I’d bring the pile of letters and fliers up to the house and I always felt like mailmen must be the happiest people in the world. They got to deliver all the things people were waiting for. It felt like a sort of super power.
And there was always mail at our box. My mother loved her trashy magazines. She had subscriptions to every single one you can think of—People, TV Guide, Soap Opera Digest. And she never threw any of them away, much to everyone’s chagrin. Years later I was still finding boxes of Good Housekeeping back issues in one of our barns that we used for storage.
Her other passion was spending Daddy’s money, so there were also credit card bills and catalogs full of more stuff for Mama to buy. She never saw the bills, of course. They’d only upset her, and she wouldn’t know what to do with them anyway. Those I’d been taught to separate and set on the table in the foyer, where Daddy would collect them.
So, for Mama it was just the magazines and the catalogs. And on her favorite days— packages.
Nothing made Mama happier than new things.
And we all strove to keep Mama happy. When she wasn’t, life could be difficult.
Thus, I was very much in love with the mail. I enjoyed having a task and purpose; something that pleased my parents.
It was so hard to please them most of the time. Even when I grew up, I barely could make a decision without considering what Mama would think.
Later, after both my parents died, I moved my family back into my childhood home. I couldn’t bear the thought of selling it anyway, and I thought being there might keep my parents alive for me somehow. I’d always dreamt of raising my own children inside the rooms of my own past.
Maybe I hoped it could help me make sense of it.
And because life really is a cycle, my own sweet girls would get off their school bus and bring me the mail. Unlike my mother, I’d be waiting for them on the porch, more delighted to see them than anything they’d found in an old mailbox.
But it also made me remember something sweet about Mama, something that could often be difficult for me. It really is the little things that stay with you.
Occasionally your happiest memories can make you the saddest.
But up until that afternoon in January, nothing had tarnished the memory of mail.
My daughters had no idea when they handed me that large envelope, with the silver swirling handwriting spelling out my name and address on the front, that it would ruin mail for me forever. I would never again not be terrified of what was waiting for me inside that box at the end of that long, shaded driveway.
* * *
I didn’t open it until the evening.
I knew it was probably the typical annual invitation to my college reunion. It was earlier than usual to receive it, but I figured maybe the committee who handled reunion weekend was just more on their game that year with preparations. Surveys from the alumnae probably encouraged them to give more notice about events so people could plan and all. Life was busy, and the modern Martha Jefferson girl needed time to get things in order.
I will never forget the brief and blissful time before I opened it. I wish I could live there forever.
My husband had just called to say hello to the girls before they went to bed. He was in San Francisco, on business. I’d handed them my cell phone so they could talk to him and then I’d gone up to my bedroom to change into my pajamas.
Our housekeeper, Glenda, stayed downstairs with the girls. She knew my husband’s phone calls made me gloomy. I’d never even had to tell her. She’d just known.
Women can instinctually tell these things, can’t they?
Glenda stayed with the girls and assured me that after the phone call was finished she’d have them help with dinner clean up. I don’t like my girls to get out of helping with those things; it’s not good for them to assume someone will clean up their messes. I wanted to raise them to know how to clean up their own.
My husband didn’t appreciate it, but he had stopped trying to understand why I raised our children the way I did a long time ago. He cared about their grades and their activities.
I cared about everything else.
I mention that, because it was on my mind. As I was pulling on my satin pajama pants and matching shirt, I kept thinking about our problems and how it felt like they’d never get worked out.
I sat down on the chaise next to the small desk I keep in our room, where I sometimes wrote letters. I hated typing emails. They felt so impersonal to me. I preferred seeing my words spilled in ink from a fancy pen across expensive stationary.
But again, it was the mail thing. I guess I had a fetish.
I noticed Glenda or one of the girls had been kind enough to put my mail on my desk.
I was delighted to have something to get my mind off the state of my marriage. I sprung over to the upholstered bench I’d had made just for the antique desk, a bench that matched the drapes of a room that had once been my parents’.
The first envelope was an invitation to a charity luncheon held by the Junior League. I put it aside.
The second letter was from the country club, reminding me we were late on our annual dues. I paused and thought about opening my laptop so I could go online and pay them before I forgot, but that just sounded exhausting to me. Lately it had been hard to do even the simple tasks.
I’d do it tomorrow. The country club’s reception hall was named after my grandfather. They could wait another day. I wasn’t concerned.
Finally, the big envelope with the sloping, beautiful writing on the front. Sure enough, the return address was Martha Jefferson College, another (mostly) beautiful memory from long ago.
I carefully and methodically sliced it open with my monogrammed letter opener that had been a wedding gift from my roommate Brooke.
I pulled out the stiff, crisp invite made from what was probably very costly cotton card-stock.
That’s the moment I wish I could freeze and rewind so that the next moment never happened.
But I can’t. None of us can.
As soon as I read it, my memory went blank. Like the moment between an ending of a movie before the credits roll.
I don’t remember what happened next. Glenda apparently found me before the girls did, thankfully. I had screamed and I was crying hysterically. When they pried the crumpled invitation from my hand and asked me what was wrong, I could only manage to get one word past my choked sobs.
Brentmore.
Three
AMANDA
Before Hollywood introduced me to the cornucopia of chemical alternatives, nostalgia was my drug of choice. It helped put a shine to the memories that had a tinge of pain on their borders.
Sentimentality is the way I remember things as I wish they’d been, instead of how they actually were. It’s the only way I was able to get out of bed on the countless mornings since that terrible night— my last one at Martha Jefferson College.
I’d been able to move forward only because there was no other direction to go in. I wasn’t like the other girls. I didn’t have the luxury of falling apart and spending my days ruminating on Daddy’s dime. I didn’t have a trust fund or even a family to stand behind me so I could have the time I needed to process what happened
that night on the hills of an all-women’s college in the Shenandoah Valley.
My only choice was to get on with the rest of my life.
So, I did.
Or so I thought.
* * *
The invite showed up at my house in LA on a Thursday. My assistant handles my mail for me, weeding out the junk.
And what is junk mail for me? It tends to be a lot of unsolicited screenplays and spec scripts, along with a few novels from publishers hoping to get the attention of my production company. I mean, these days when Netflix will toss a shit ton of money at just about anything, there are so many novelists now hoping to be the next Big Little Lies or Gone Girl. So, my team had to always be on top of the slush pile. They kept that stuff away from me, thank God.
