Chapter 1
It was a beautiful early October day, the weather was warm, the leaves were
starting to turn in a riot of color, and the wedding had gone perfectly. Halley Holbrook
sat in a quiet corner of the peaceful terrace overlooking the exquisite garden of the
Connecticut estate she had rented for her daughter Valerie’s wedding. The bridal couple
had wanted a daytime wedding, with a morning ceremony, a celebratory lunch, and an
afternoon of dancing. By six o’clock, the couple had left and the guests had said their
goodbyes and thanks to Halley for a fabulous event, and she took a moment to sit quietly
and think about what an unforgettable day it had been.
Valerie was a tall, fine-featured blonde, twenty-seven years old, and she had been
dating Seth Parker for almost three years. They had met at the beginning of the
pandemic, and had gotten close quickly, sheltering together in place several times.
Valerie was an attorney at a firm that specialized in entertainment law, and Seth Parker
was one of their major clients, the producer of a string of hit TV series. He was thirtynine years old,
divorced, with no children, and had a massive, successful, allconsuming career,
which was convenient for Valerie, since she was in no rush to have
children and start a family. She was much more interested in becoming a partner at the
law firm where she worked. They had offices in Los Angeles and New York and she
had been commuting between the two cities for the past two years, in order to be with
Seth. She had just moved to L.A., a month before the wedding. Most of the two hundred
and eighty-five guests and wedding party had flown in from there, several of them on
private planes.
Valerie’s identical twin sister, Olivia, had moved to Los Angeles at the same time
Valerie did. She was an artist and could work anywhere, and she had just signed a
contract with a reputable contemporary art gallery in L.A. to represent her. The girls
had given up the New York apartment they shared in Tribeca when Valerie was in town,
and Olivia had given up her studio in SoHo. They were making a clean break by going
to the West Coast together, which was how they had done everything all their lives.
They were inseparable, had gone to school together since nursery school, and had gone
to Yale because of the excellent fine arts department for Olivia. When Valerie went on
to Columbia Law School in New York, Olivia was back in the city working in her
studio.
Halley lived in New York on Fifth Avenue in a beautiful big apartment, where she
and her daughters had lived for nineteen years, since Halley’s first best-selling novel.
The twins had been eight when they moved there from a much smaller, more modest
apartment on the Upper West Side, which had been all Halley could afford at the time.
Their current apartment still felt like home to the twins. Halley lived there alone now,
but the girls visited often, and spent weekends with their mother occasionally. When
they did, the three of them always had fun together.
It was going to change Halley’s life dramatically not to have her daughters nearby.
One or both of them had always been available for a spontaneous meal, a movie, or an
afternoon of shopping when she wasn’t writing. She rarely had a day without one or
both of the twins in it. If Valerie was busy, Halley would drop in at Olivia’s studio on
her way home, to see what she was working on. Olivia had a great eye for form and
color, and real talent. Halley and her daughters were extremely close and called
themselves the three musketeers. Now it would all be different, with the girls living in
L.A.
Valerie’s fiancé, Seth, didn’t mind having Olivia tag along. He enjoyed having two
beautiful women with him, and teased them about it. Valerie was confident and
outgoing, with determined opinions and occasionally a sharp tongue. She didn’t hesitate
to go after what she wanted, and was outspoken. Olivia was quieter and more retiring,
she had a gentler style and her mother often found her to be the kinder, more empathetic,
and compassionate of the two. Valerie was a fighter for whatever she set her sights on.
Olivia was less sure of herself and could be swayed more easily. She was no match for
her twin sister in an argument, and favored the underdog in most things. She was usually
more sympathetic to her mother than Valerie, who had a more cut-and-dried,
black-andwhite view of everything, including their mother. Valerie’s battles with their mother had
been fierce in her teens, but had calmed down eventually. Olivia had been the
peacemaker.
Olivia was worried about her mother now that she’d be alone in New York. Valerie
said she’d be fine and dismissed her twin’s concerns. She was busy setting up the
spectacular house Seth had just bought for them in Bel Air. Olivia was renting a small,
modest 1930s Spanish-style house with a pool, nearby in Beverly Hills, but Valerie had
set up a room for her in their house too, so Olivia could stay with them whenever she
wanted. They had shared a room for their entire lives until Valerie got married. Valerie
tried to include her twin in everything she did. Olivia was the person Valerie loved
most in the world, even more than Seth or their mother. It was the nature of twins, and a
relationship like no other, for both of them.
—
Halley had brought the girls up on her own, in somewhat unusual circumstances. She
was twenty-two when they were born, and forty-nine now. She was turning fifty in
December, which was a landmark she wasn’t looking forward to. It made her feel old,
although she wasn’t, and she looked younger than her age. She was facing an empty nest
for the first time. The three of them often took trips together. Now she’d have to wait for
them to visit from L.A. She didn’t want to intrude on them, particularly Valerie in her
new life. It was all going to be very different. Halley was determined to make the best
of it and fill her own life. She had a demanding writing career, which would keep her
busy. She worked late into the night, and hadn’t had a man in her life in three years.
Valerie’s wedding had marked the end of a chapter, a big one for Halley. The twins
had been the hub of her life and her whole universe for twenty-seven years. She would
have to get used to being on her own now, with them living far away. Halley was still a
strikingly beautiful woman, with creamy white skin, green eyes, and hair as dark as the
twins’ was fair. The girls looked a great deal like her, except for their coloring. Like
her own mother, Halley had modeled briefly when she was at Connecticut College and
after she graduated. She had done it for the extra money, but writing had been her
passion. She poured her heart and soul into what she wrote, which her readers could
feel in every word. There was honesty and integrity and raw emotion in her writing. She
never hid from the truth and her stories touched her readers deeply.
She had started writing seriously after the twins were born. After five years of
struggling with her first novel, her perseverance paid off. Her first book was published
when she was twenty-seven, and she had her first bestseller three years later, at thirty. It
was a dark, complicated psychological novel that had captivated reviewers and won
her a loyal readership from then on. She had a deep compassion for human suffering,
and clearly a profound knowledge and understanding of those who created it. There was
a hungry audience for what she wrote. She struck a universal chord in her readers. For
the past nineteen years, every book she’d written had been on the major bestseller lists.
She had a rewarding career, which would fill her time once the twins left.
She was planning to start a new book that week, which would distract her from their
absence. Valerie would be on her honeymoon, and Olivia painting in L.A. All Halley’s
familiar landmarks were slipping away. She tried not to dwell on it, but she felt like a
ship slowly leaving port for unknown destinations. She had no idea where she was
headed, without her daughters near at hand, other than writing the next book. Writing
was what she knew, and it had always saved her. It was the one place where she felt
safe and comfortable, and she knew that writing the book now would ground her, as it
always did. She was determined to fill her time without her daughters, and have a good
life on her own, whatever it took. She would have to learn to live without them.
—
The wedding was lavish but just restrained enough to be elegant and not overdone
or pretentious. Vogue had covered it. The guests were exuberant in a wholesome way.
They danced through the afternoon and into the evening. Seth and Valerie’s friends were
happy for them. In their three years together they had built a solid relationship, knew
each other well, had a wide circle of friends, and always managed to include Olivia.
Halley had written Valerie a letter, telling her how happy she was for her and that she
was sure their union would be a success, and Valerie was touched by her mother’s faith
in her. Halley had given her the letter the night before the wedding.
Although Valerie rarely said it, both twins were fully aware of how much their
mother had done for them, with no help from anyone. They didn’t know a great deal
about her childhood and youth. She seldom spoke of it, and avoided discussing the
details with them. She was always reticent and discreet. Both girls had long since
understood that she didn’t like to talk about her past, and never explained why. But it
was obvious that she had suffered more than she admitted. She preferred to live in the
present, and had buried the past.
Halley was talented, modest, and enormously successful in her own right, and didn’t
make a fuss about it. She had no one to rely on but herself. That had always been the
case. She was six years old when her mother left her and her father. It had been a blow
at first, but a mixed blessing, as it made her strong and resilient and self-reliant, traits
she tried to impart to her girls, even though they didn’t need to be as independent as she
had been as a child. They had her to comfort and protect them. She had never let them
down, and they knew she never would. She was as solid as a rock and had always been
there when they needed her, at every age, and even now. Whenever one of them called,
she was instantly available to them, eager to listen and offer advice, if asked, or even if
not. But she knew she had to let them go and let them fly now, and she had to forge a life
of her own without them. Valerie’s marriage and the girls’ move to L.A. provided a
natural break for all three of them, and a time to grow up, for Halley too. It was
necessary, but nonetheless painful for her. It was a huge change.
—
Halley lay back in a chair on the terrace after everyone had left and she visualized
the wedding again. It had been entirely made up of the couple’s friends, and very few of
Halley’s, which was the style of weddings nowadays. Seth’s mother was there, although
he wasn’t close to her. He and his brother, Peter, were the product of her first marriage.
She’d had three husbands, and she lived in Palm Springs with her current one. Seth and
Peter had no relationship with their father and hadn’t seen him in five years. He was
married to his fifth wife. Halley had talked to Seth’s mother at the wedding and had
nothing in common with her. But Seth and his brother were close. They’d had very little
parenting growing up in L.A. Seth had made a big career for himself in television
production. And Peter was a tax attorney for several famous clients.
The wedding guests were attractive and successful, some of them celebrities with
big careers of their own. They were impressed by Seth’s dazzling success in TV. He had
fallen in love with Valerie the first time he laid eyes on her, when she walked into a
meeting at the law firm that represented him. He had been instantly enchanted by her and
attracted to her, and fascinated when he discovered she had an identical twin, and met
Olivia, who looked entirely the same, but was a completely different person. Like
everyone who knew them, he had a hard time telling them apart at first. Even Halley
made mistakes at times, and they had loved playing tricks on their mother, their friends,
and their teachers when they were younger, and even on the boys they dated in high
school and college. Olivia had never had a long-term serious boyfriend and few
shortterm ones. Valerie had dated many men, but Seth was the first one she fell seriously in
love with. He was her soulmate.
Physically, the twins were indistinguishable, but no two women could have been
more dissimilar in personality. Valerie’s steely determination served her well in her
law career. She was a strong woman with definite ideas, sure of her opinions and
willing to defend them. Valerie had her mother’s strength and perseverance. Olivia had
Halley’s warmth, compassion, kindness, and artistic nature. Halley felt at times as
though her traits had been equally divided between them, but not blended. She could see
herself in both of them, her weaknesses and her strengths. But their history was not even
remotely similar to hers. She had done everything in her power to make sure of that.
—
Halley had followed in her own French mother’s footsteps when she modeled
briefly in college and for a short time after. She had no long-term ambitions in that
direction, unlike her mother. Halley only did it for the extra money. She’d been in the
studio of a famous photographer, Locke Logan, who had been taken with her innocent
charm when she modeled for him. She was shy and retiring, always happy to disappear
into the background. He had taken an interest in her and had taken her under his wing.
He loved photographing her. She had an inner beauty that shone through.
She was twenty-two at the time, and he was forty-eight. He was married and had
three children. He fell in love with Halley, and took a spectacular series of nude
photographs of her that became legendary. You couldn’t see her face but there was an
innocence and poignancy to the photographs and a vulnerability that touched him
profoundly. He never had any intention of getting divorced. Halley was one of a long
series of affairs. His wife was well aware of and tolerated them, and had infidelities of
her own in their stormy marriage.
When Halley got pregnant, she hesitated to have an abortion, and after the first
sonogram, as soon as she knew she was having twins, she couldn’t do it, and decided to
have them. She asked nothing of Locke. He stuck by her and helped financially to the
degree Halley needed. A small trust from her grandparents gave her enough to live on
modestly, and Locke’s contributions made up the difference. Halley was careful and
responsible, and took motherhood seriously. She put her own youth on hold to take care
of the twins and be a good mother to them.
Locke saw them from time to time and was warm and playful with the twins, but
fatherhood was not his long suit. By the time he got divorced a decade later, the affair
with Halley was long over. He remained a figurehead in the twins’ lives, and came to
their birthdays and graduations. He was never on hand for their daily lives. He loved
them, and Halley, in his own erratic, irresponsible way. Halley made up for it by being
everything to the girls.
He had been at Valerie’s wedding but Valerie had opted to walk down the aisle
alone. Locke had never been a father figure to her, but she was happy to have him there.
He was seventy-five years old now, still working though slowing down, and had come
to the wedding with the young model he was currently dating, several years younger
than the twins. She couldn’t have been more than twenty. He and Halley had stayed on
good terms. He never interfered, and she hadn’t needed his help in nearly twenty years.
Once her second book became successful, she and the twins had been secure. Halley
never took her success for granted and was grateful she could do that for them.
The twins had lived a very comfortable life thanks to her. The fact that their parents
had never been married posed very little problem and hadn’t bothered them. And Locke
showed up when it was important to them. He hadn’t been a very present or strong
influence in their lives, but he had been good enough and a loving though distant
presence at key times. Halley supplied all the rest and was ever present, fully
responsible, and always loving. She had been the mainstay of their lives, and they of
hers. She had grown up quickly once she had them. Valerie had been briefly critical of
her as a teenager, but once they grew up, both girls agreed that she was a terrific mother,
and she had never let them down. If anything, she held on a little too tight, but their
move to L.A. would change that, which all three of them recognized. Halley wasn’t
fighting it, she was trying to adjust and love them with open arms, and fill her time in
other ways. Nothing would replace having them in her daily life, but she was choosing
to view it as an opportunity to grow and to develop a new life of her own, a challenge
she was determined to meet with grace, and without being a burden to her daughters.
—
Halley had had no family of her own from the time she was fourteen, so her decision
to have the twins, unmarried at twenty-two, didn’t shock anyone. There was no one to
shock or to help, except the babies’ father to the minimal degree he wanted to be
involved. He had his hands full then with his own three children and a turbulent, failing
marriage. Halley had made no demands, and figured out most of her parenting on her
own. Her being busy with the twins had precluded much of a dating life, and she had
virtually no serious love life for a decade, a sacrifice she had willingly made. She had a
few brief minor affairs, and met the love of her life at thirty-five. Robert Baldwin was
two years older than she was, and fell deeply in love with her and the twins. He was a
senior editor at her publishing house, never married, with no children of his own. They
had spent twelve years together, and lived together for ten of them. He had developed a
brain tumor at forty-nine, almost three years before. He was in the final stages of his
illness at the beginning of the pandemic, when he caught Covid. Officially, he had died
of the coronavirus, but he wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway. Halley had made
her peace with losing him. They would have enjoyed the years after the twins left, and
filled them well, but that wasn’t their destiny. She had to face that now on her own. She
had nursed him until the end. He had decided not to go to the hospital when he caught
Covid. He didn’t want to die alone at the hospital, so he had stayed at home with her
and died peacefully in her arms. And miraculously, she hadn’t caught the virus from
him, but she had been willing to take the risk to give him the end he wanted. They had
isolated from the twins. He was a wonderful human being and the twins had loved him
too. He was the reason for Valerie deciding to walk down the aisle alone. Robert had
been more of a father to her than her own father was, and without Robert there, she had
chosen to walk alone, in memory of him. The gesture had touched Halley to the core.
—
The childhood history Halley never shared with the twins, or as little as possible,
had been very different from Valerie and Olivia’s. Halley’s mother had been French,
which was one of the few details the girls knew about her. Halley’s maternal
grandmother, Hélène Vivier, was a young woman at the end of the war, when the
Americans liberated Paris. She fell in love with a handsome boy from California and
got pregnant. He intended to take her back to California and marry her there, to live and
work on the farm where he grew up near Bakersfield. GI’s weren’t allowed to marry in
France, and he was going to send for her once he got home. When they discovered that
she was pregnant, they had a marriage ceremony performed by a local priest in Paris,
which the Americans didn’t recognize, but which gave Hélène some comfort and
dignity. Both her parents had died during the war, her mother of illness and her father in
the Resistance. Hélène’s handsome GI was one of the last casualties in France and died
before he got back to the States. She could never find his family later, and their
daughter, Sabine, was born in 1946.
With no other attributes or skills other than her striking beauty, Sabine became a
model in Paris in her late teens. Her mother had died from tuberculosis by then, and
Sabine was on her own. She was sent to New York for a photo shoot at nineteen, and the
modeling agency that had brought her over helped her use her parents’ French marriage
certificate to prove the paternity of her American GI father, which allowed her to obtain
American citizenship so she could stay and work legally in the States. She never
became a superstar, but she was a very successful model for a time, and rapidly fell in
with the fast crowd of celebrities and socialites at the fashionable Stork Club, the last
club of its kind, and became one of a bevy of beautiful women who danced and drank
their nights away.
Sabine partied for the next six years, was frequently photographed in the press with
important men. At twenty-five, she met William Holbrook IV, the black sheep scion of
his aristocratic family. The family had lost the bulk of their fortune in the crash of 1929,
but they had enough left for him to play, gamble, drink, and spend what remained on
beautiful women and fast cars, without working, and he was most frequently seen with
Sabine, who eventually got pregnant. Bill did the gentlemanly thing and married her,
although neither was in love, or enthusiastic about the marriage or the child, and it
didn’t slow down his affairs with other women. Halley was born in 1972, when Sabine
was twenty-six and Bill was forty-two. Sabine had the distinguished Holbrook name
then and she blamed the child for all the ills in her life, a husband who didn’t love her,
the fetters of marriage to a man she didn’t love either, her slowly fading beauty from the
dissolute life they led, and her modeling career on the wane. She was no longer the
woman everyone stopped to stare at when she walked into a room, and she blamed
Halley more than Bill. If Sabine hadn’t had Halley, she would never have married him.
She was uneasy about abortion, so she didn’t have one. She married Bill, since he was
willing. And he was from an important family. But she wasn’t happy about him, or the
marriage.
Halley’s first memory of her mother was of a severe beating when she was three.
She had spilled a glass of milk at breakfast, which dripped on Sabine’s navy blue suede
shoes, and she beat Halley until blood dripped from her ear. Bill saw her do it and
quietly left the apartment. He had an appointment with his barber and didn’t want to be
late. He left Sabine to deal with the child, as he always did. Halley remembered his
leaving while her mother was beating her. She remembered the sound of the front door
closing as her mother landed another blow. Sabine said her shoes were ruined.
She took Halley to the hospital to stop the bleeding, and said she had fallen down
the stairs. Halley instinctively knew not to contradict her and remained silent when they
treated her. A nice nurse said she was lucky she hadn’t broken an arm or a leg. And just
for good measure, her mother hit her again when they got home. She said Halley had
ruined her day as well as her shoes. Halley was afraid to drink her milk at breakfast
after that, and never did again, no matter how thirsty she was. She didn’t want to risk
making her mother angry again, but it was unavoidable.
That was only the beginning. Sabine unleashed her full fury on Halley from then on,
with beatings for any excuse. She had a violent temper, and hit Halley hard. A broken
wrist, a beating with a jeweled belt buckle that left cuts and marks on her back that
couldn’t be explained so they were never treated and left scars, a cut just below her eye
from the ring Sabine was wearing, which required stitches. She told the nurses at the
hospital that Halley had fallen into the corner of a table. She was four by then.
Very few memories of Halley’s childhood remained, and there were none of
kindness or a gentle touch. But she remembered each of the beatings for the rest of her
life, carved in memory as though etched in stone. A push down the stairs, a broken arm,
bruises on her arms and legs when her mother kicked her, beatings with a hairbrush,
headaches from being violently shaken when she caught her mother doing something
bad, like meeting men at their apartment when her father was out. Her mother said she
would kill her if she told, and Halley knew she would. She never understood why her
mother was so angry at her and hated her so much. She tried to be very good, but she
was never good enough to satisfy her mother, who told her that nobody loved her.
Halley knew that was true. Her parents demonstrated that to her every day, especially
Sabine. Her mother spoke to her in French and in English. She was just as violent to
Halley in either one.
The beatings got worse as she got older. The marks and the bruises were there, but
usually faded away, though a few stayed. She lived in constant fear of her mother, and
hid from her whenever she could. More often than not, her mother found her and beat
her again for hiding. Her father never intervened. When Halley was five, Sabine found a
new playground, new friends and pursuits. She became one of the first regulars at
Studio 54, where she added drugs to alcohol. The marriage was almost nonexistent by
then, and her modeling had dwindled to an occasional job until the agency dropped her
entirely. She never showed up on time and looked ravaged when she did. Halley
learned much of what was happening when she heard her parents argue, usually at night,
if Sabine came home. She didn’t always.
Sometimes neither of her parents would come home, and Halley was alone. It
frightened her at first, but she fed herself from what was in the fridge when she got
hungry. She would sit in her room and talk to her dolls and play, or watch TV in her
father’s study. And then one day, miraculously, Sabine left after a particularly vicious
fight with Bill, and never returned. A week later, he told Halley her mother was never
coming back. Halley didn’t know what that meant for her and was afraid to ask. All she
remembered was the enormous feeling of relief that the beatings would stop. She was
six then. She could tell that her father was happy too.
Once Sabine left, her father gave parties all the time, and filled their large,
comfortable Park Avenue apartment with his friends, whom Halley had never seen
before. No one paid any attention to Halley for the first year, but she was cursed with
her mother’s dark hair, green eyes, and beautiful face. Their housekeeper was there in
the daytime, and the parties went on all night.
She was seven the first time one of her father’s friends put his hands on her. He
began stroking her arm in a strange way, and tried to pull her into a bedroom with him,
and Bill told him to stop. It was the only time he ever intervened. After that he treated
her like a toy for his friends’ amusement when they hugged her too tight, or sat her on
their laps. Her father ignored her entirely, as though she was someone else’s child. He
never believed her when she complained about them, so she stopped telling him what
they tried to do, and figured out ways to avoid them herself. If they were drunk enough,
it was easy to run away from them and hide until they left. If they were sober, they didn’t
dare insist when she resisted or escaped from them.
—
She was almost eight when another one of her father’s friends reached under her
skirt, and that time no one saw. She ran away and hid in a closet until he left. There
were others after that, always wanting to touch her in private places, but she was artful
at avoiding them and fleeing to another part of the apartment where she could hide. She
was afraid to go to bed when his friends were there. Once one of them came into her
room and got into bed with her, but he was so drunk he was easy to get away from. She
was small but fast, and clever at disappearing. She slept in her closet after that. Her
father said they were just having fun, and meant no harm, but she didn’t believe him. She
knew the look in their eyes now, and what they would try to do after that. None of them
ever succeeded. She didn’t let it happen, and knew that only she could save herself, no
one else would help her. She had no protectors or allies. The adults in her life were
dangerous. She had only herself to rely on.
When she was still eight, her father told her that her mother had died of an overdose.
She hadn’t seen or heard from her since she’d left two years before, and no one had
beaten Halley since. She wasn’t sad when Bill told her that Sabine had died, but she
knew she should be. She was just relieved to know her mother would never come back
to hit her again. She had been afraid Sabine might come back and do that again one day,
and that Bill would let her.
Halley went to the funeral with her father. They were the only ones there. Bill’s
parents had died by then, and they buried Sabine in the same place as his parents. She
was thirty-four years old.
Halley spent the next five years avoiding her father’s friends. She knew when to stay
away from them. By the time she was thirteen, she had a womanly body, with small firm
breasts, a tiny waist, her mother’s long, graceful legs and exquisite face. Many of her
father’s friends tried to take advantage of her, and Bill turned a blind eye, just as he had
to the beatings. But she was an expert at avoiding them. She was well aware that she
was a burden to her father—he made that clear. He had housekeepers take care of her in
the daytime, but they never stayed long. In light of the debauchery they knew went on
there, they always quit. Halley didn’t care. They were no protection for her anyway.
When she was thirteen, her father stepped over the line himself, one evening before
he went out. The housekeeper had already left for the day. They were alone in the
apartment, and he’d been drinking all day with his friends and had come home to
change, as he often did. He walked into her room while she was studying at her desk,
and she turned when she heard him come in. He was naked and very drunk and invited
her to take a bath with him. She was shaking as she kept her eyes on his face, and
wouldn’t let herself look any lower. Knowing she had to get out of the room she pushed
her way past him, mumbling some excuse, and he staggered when he tried to follow her.
Then he didn’t try to find her, and went to his bathroom alone. She couldn’t forget the
way he had looked at her, and she hid in a closet until she heard the apartment door
close behind him. She never trusted him again, and locked her bedroom and bathroom
doors after that whenever he was in the apartment. She had no illusions about him. He
was just like his friends. She lived in enemy territory, with no one to protect her, no one
she could turn to or ask for help. She had no friends at school because she couldn’t
bring them home. And her father’s family name, background, and social status protected
him from all suspicion. No one would have believed her if she told them, and she
wouldn’t have dared. She rarely met his girlfriends. They didn’t look like nice women.
They treated her like an annoyance.
When she was fourteen, one afternoon after she came home from school, two
policemen came to the apartment to tell her that her father had been killed in a car
accident. He was fifty-six years old. She sat in the living room and talked to them like
an adult, which she was by then, because of the life she had lived. She had no living
relatives. The officers took her with them to stay in a children’s shelter.
Her father’s lawyer came to talk to her there the next day. He explained that there
was a trust for her education and related expenses when she turned eighteen, and a small
second trust from her paternal grandparents when she turned twenty-one, but no funds
were available until then. Her father hadn’t expected to die so young and had made no
provision for her until she reached eighteen. He had spent most of his money. There was
very little left, barely enough to pay his debts. The apartment would be sold and the
proceeds added to her trust, with no access to it until she turned eighteen, no money
until then, and no one to take care of her. She had four years ahead of her with no means
of support. She was sent from the shelter to a state orphanage on the Lower East Side in
Manhattan. There was no funeral for her father and she wouldn’t have gone anyway. His
lawyer arranged for him to be cremated, according to his wishes, with no religious
service, and buried in the family plot with Halley’s mother and grandparents. He had
wanted no funeral, and had said he was an atheist. His lawyer took care of everything.
He offered to take Halley to the burial and she refused.
The other children at the orphanage were from poor families and younger than she
was. They had no trusts to look forward to at eighteen, but they might be adopted. She
was told by the superintendent of the orphanage that at fourteen it was unlikely that
anyone would want to adopt her. Two families tried her out as foster parents, and said
that she hid all the time, refused to engage, barely spoke to them, was closed off and
uncommunicative, and they returned her to the orphanage. She preferred it there anyway.
She didn’t trust the fathers in the two homes she was sent to. She knew what men were
capable of. It never even occurred to her to want a family that would love her. She
couldn’t conceive of it, having never been loved by her own family. She couldn’t even
imagine what that felt like.
Halley spent the four years in the orphanage without complaint, until her eighteenth
birthday. She felt safe there. She helped out in the office, to have something to do after
school. She attended public high school a few blocks away, made no friends because
she was too ashamed of where she lived, and was reticent with the teachers. Her own
home had been far worse than the orphanage. She had time to study there and the
counselors and teachers were kind to her. She was a good student, and a school
counselor had helped her apply to college. She remained shy and unengaged. She
enrolled at Connecticut College, and was released from the orphanage like a prisoner
who had served her time when she turned eighteen. Her counselors had helped her get
her high school diploma six months early, and she left as soon as she got it, with no
fanfare and a few discreet goodbyes. She had formed no close relationships, and didn’t
want any. In four years she hadn’t opened up to anyone. The funds from the trust were
waiting for her in a bank account.
She rented a room near the college in New London, Connecticut, and got a job at a
bookstore until classes started in the fall. She moved into the dorms in August. It was a
small, picturesque college with two thousand students, on seven hundred and fifty acres
of land overlooking Long Island Sound, with the quaint seaport town of Mystic a few
miles away. It was a gentle place for her to reenter the world.
Halley spent peaceful years there, and got excellent grades, particularly in her
creative writing classes. She made a few friends and had a few dates, and no serious
romances. She didn’t share her history with anyone, or tell anyone she had spent her
high school years in a state orphanage. She wanted to disappear into the crowd and was
afraid to attach to anyone. She focused on her classes and kept to herself. She took a
heavy class load and graduated in three years, when she was twenty-one. She went back
to New York when she graduated, rented a studio apartment with the money from her
grandparents, which was available to her by then, and still had some of her father’s
money left. She worked as a model to earn some extra money, and met Locke Logan.
Locke was gentle and protective and he was the first person she had ever told about the
abuse she had endured as a child. He asked her about it, when he saw the scars on her
body, which upset him for her. He airbrushed them after he photographed her. Even with
the scars she was stunningly beautiful. There was a gentle aura about her, and something
magical about her from within. Listening to her history, Locke knew that Halley was a
remarkable person, more than he could cope with, or deserved. She was like a survivor
of a terrible war, with scars so deep he had no idea how to help her heal them. She had
endured so much and was incredibly strong. And what struck him was that there was a
light in her that nothing she had experienced had extinguished. She still burned brightly
with kindness and hope. Her mother had beaten her body, but hadn’t killed her spirit.
The first time Halley opened her heart and fell deeply in love was with the twins
she gave birth to. She gave them all the love she had pent up for years and didn’t even
know was in her. All her forgiveness and love and compassion went into her mothering.
She never told them the story of her childhood and youth. She didn’t want them to know,
and only said it had been difficult, and offered no details. She was afraid they might
blame her for it, as her parents had, as though it had been her fault. She was grateful that
she had an unlimited supply of love to give the twins, all the more because of what she
had been through herself.
Once she met Robert, she told him her secrets over time, and eventually had told
him all of it. He had guessed some of it from her writing, where she exposed herself and
her deepest feelings. It made his heart ache for her as he came to understand and know
about her past. He was awed by her fortitude and endurance, and that there was anything
left of her at all. He thought she was more human because of it, deeper and stronger, and
more loving, not less. Before she met Robert, she knew she could love a child, but
didn’t know if she could love a man. He loved her with such gentleness and compassion
that she blossomed and thrived. She was able to open up to him as she never had before,
physically and emotionally. She admitted to him guiltily that she had never forgiven her
parents, and he didn’t see how she could. He hated them on her behalf, for everything
they had done to her, but she didn’t expect him to. He loved her even more, knowing her
history. She had no bitterness or anger. She had survived, and that was enough. And she
was able to love, which was a miracle in itself.
Robert was the first man she had ever trusted and loved. Their relationship was
whole and clean, with no lingering trace of the damage that had been done to her. She
had buried the past in a dark, secret place and moved on. She had left the past behind,
with no desire to unearth it. Loving the twins, and being the kind of mother she’d never
had, had healed her deepest wounds. And Robert was her reward for surviving.
Halley lived in the sunlight of the present, not the dark shadows of the past. She
loved Robert purely and simply, as she did the twins, and he had unlimited love to give
her. Losing him when he died was the first real loss she regretted in her life. The evil
people in her past no longer mattered. Robert and the twins had amply made up for them
and had healed her injuries. He had helped her to erase the past. She never thought of it.
It felt like someone else’s life, and she never spoke of it. The stories were too brutal to
tell.
—
She thought of Robert as she sat in the quiet corner of the terrace where Valerie had
gotten married. She wished he could have seen it, but maybe he had from wherever he
was now. She still missed him but the years they had shared had been an immeasurable
gift, enough to make up for everything else. She had no burden of hatred to carry. She
was fueled and motivated by love. It filled her soul, poured through her writing, and
soothed the pain of the past. She had let it all go through her writing, and her love for
Robert and the twins.
Valerie’s wedding marked the end of an era. The twins moving to L.A. was a major
loss for Halley. But she had survived much harder things, her parents, the orphanage, the
years alone before the twins were born, when she had no one to love and to love her.
What she and the twins had shared would give her the strength now to make a new life
for herself, without them in it every day.
She never knew why she had survived her childhood. The scars were there to
remind her, but they had faded and seemed unreal now, like part of someone else’s life.
There were no longer scars on her heart. Robert and the twins had healed them. Halley
was a whole human being and radiated goodness and hope. The poison of her youth had
never touched her. It had only made her stronger. She knew she could survive anything,
and already had.
She had volunteered anonymously for years at various shelters and facilities for
abused women and children, to show them that they could survive, no matter how
violent the past. It didn’t have to color their future or keep them from leading a good
life. She had found her voice and healing through her writing. The abuse she had
survived was not a death sentence, it was a challenge to face and overcome. There
could be a good life afterward, you had to reach out and grab it, and Halley had, with
Robert’s help, and her girls. They had been the bridge to health and sanity for her, the
way back.
A little while later, as it got dark, she gathered up her things, thanked the still busy
wedding coordinator, took a last look around, and drove back to New York. She had a
peaceful feeling of accomplishment as she did. All her minute attention to detail had
paid off. Valerie’s wedding had been a success. The twins were off to their own life in
California. All she had to do now was start to fill her own life again. She had done it
before. It was a mountain she knew she could climb. She had the courage and the
strength, and enough love stored up in her to carry her through. Nothing could diminish
her love for her daughters, and the deep love and respect she and Robert had shared.
The ghosts of the past were gone forever and could never hurt her again. She had found
peace, and the wounds were healed.
