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“I know this will sound offensive, but my job keeps me working with people all day long. I was hoping to be alone this afternoon.”
    The woman blinked. She looked hurt. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Tess. I had wanted to get to know you.”
    Tess didn’t answer. She wasn’t going to feel bad about this. A person has the right to draw lines, to tell other people where they needed to stop. She met the woman’s gaze and gave her head the slightest shake.
This isn’t going to happen.
    “I’m sorry,” the other woman said again, and then she turned and left.
    Tess let the lace drop to her lap. Why did this woman want to get to know her? Tess had walked over and looked at the quilt covering a table. That was all. Why did the woman feel there was something at stake?
    Tess should have known that the day was bound to turn weird. What did she expect, being surrounded by Nina Lane’s fans, by people who were “connected” to Nina Lane, by people fascinated by the grisly details of her death. The fans all seemed to feel as if they had a special relationship with Nina Lane, as if they knew Nina the most, as if they loved her work the most. Tess herself didn’t feel that way about Nina Lane.
    And she was probably the one who should.
    Because, as much as Tess ignored the fact, as much as she asserted that it really had nothing to do with her—how could it when she had no memories?—she had been born among that little colony of artists and writers, and Nina Lane was her mother.

    Chapter 2
     
    S he’d always known that her mother had been a writer. Grandma had kept copies of the trilogy on a shelf in her bedroom, and Tess used to creep in and look at them sometimes, only to become bewildered by the long paragraphs and strangely spelled names.
    But she liked the idea that they had been written by her mother. She didn’t brag about it. Grandma had said that good girls didn’t “put themselves forward.” Good girls didn’t “give themselves airs.” So it was her own little secret, something that no one else seemed to know about. Her grandparents had rented their house when she was a baby, and neither of them talked about her mother much, especially to the neighbors.
    Her sixth-grade English class began its library-research unit with an assignment to pick a dead person and see what could be found. She chose Nina Lane, and within moments she learned that her mother had committed suicide.
    The next thing she remembered, she was sitting in the nurse’s office waiting for her grandmother to come.
    It was her grandfather who came. He had left work to pick her up.
    He put his arm around her as they walked out to the car. “We should have told you, we know that. But it’s been so hard … it still is.”
    Tess didn’t answer. She couldn’t.
    “Nina was a handful. We were always baffled. We couldn’t understand her. On one hand, she seemed to hate us, but she couldn’t stand to be alone. Sometimes she even slept in the hall outside our room. And she was stubborn … Lord, how she was stubborn. That’s what we thought, that she was just stubborn and selfish. We tried so hard. Your grandmother was always having to go in and talk to her teachers, begging people to give her a second, third, even fourth chance. We did our best, we really did. Then to have tried so hard, to have done so much, and have her give up on herself when we had never given up on her …”
    Tess hadn’t minded having a mother who was dead. That was all she had ever known, but to have a mother who had
chosen
to die, had chosen to leave her, that was different.
    Her grandfather was still speaking. “Now they’re saying that she had some kind of sickness in her head. We had no idea, and maybe it would have been different if we had known. You can’t know what it is like, Tess, this feeling that you didn’t do right by your child.”
    Tess wasn’t listening to him. Her mother had decided to kill herself. Her mother had chosen to leave her. That