This very unusual and unexpected road trip continued to baffle Tessa, especially as they drove further away from the city. Ian had taken her by surprise yesterday morning, informing her that they would be staying an extra night in Minneapolis and flying home this evening. This was the last stop on a visit to other hotels in the Great Lakes area - Detroit, Milwaukee, and Toronto - and normally they would have flown home to San Francisco last night. Instead, they were embarking on a mysterious drive to some increasingly rural destination. The highway had changed ten miles ago to a two lane country road, the cities had turned to towns, and landmarks were further and further apart. And with each mile, the unsettled feeling in Tessa’s tummy grew a bit stronger, the old fears that she had naively believed to be long gone returning full force.

And when they reached the outskirts of a town named Oak Grove, with a population of fewer than three thousand, Tessa knew exactly where they were. She clasped her hands in her lap to stop them from trembling, and winced a bit to realize how cold they were. As Ian took the exit from the road, she realized what his intent had been in taking this little excursion, what his purpose was in bringing her here.

“Do you know what this place is, Tessa?” he asked her quietly.

She nodded, staring out the window as they drove down the small main street of the town, past schools, churches, and a gas station, and then through neighborhoods of old but neatly kept houses.

“This - this is where my mother was born,” she replied in a flat, emotionless voice. “Where she grew up.”

“Yes.” Ian was following the directions the car’s sophisticated navigation system was giving him, and made a right turn. “Did she ever mention this place to you? Talk about growing up here?”

“No.” Tessa noticed that the houses here were smaller, older, and more rundown, the yards less tidy and maintained. “She never talked about her childhood or this place or her family. Whenever I asked she would just close up and change the subject. But, sometimes, when she was especially manic, talking a mile a minute, she’d mention Oak Grove, call it the most awful place on earth, and swear she’d never go back. I figured that was probably where she grew up, but I didn’t know for sure. And, well, this place. Especially this neighborhood we’re in right now. It - it’s exactly like the one she described in her books. She used a different name for the town, but I know now she based it on this place.”

Tessa shuddered, recalling some of the horrific scenes Gillian had detailed in her books about living in her hometown, and hoped that most of them had only been the product of her mother’s very vivid imagination. She’d always suspected that the books were at least partially autobiographical in nature, even though Gillian had used different names and locations. But the books had been all too accurate in detailing her mother’s sad, abusive childhood. and then her gradual descent into madness, details that no writer - no matter how talented or imaginative - could have made up.

Ian stopped the car in front of a small, boarded up old house. No one appeared to have lived there for quite some time, judging by the poor condition of the property, the waist high weeds in the front yard, and the total lack of any signs of human occupation. But Tessa knew this was the place her mother had grown up, and where, if her stories had been even half based on reality, she had known abuse, neglect, and poverty until she’d run away at the age of seventeen. Despite the house’s ramshackle appearance, it fit Gillian’s written descriptions of it to a tee - from the front door that was painted a faded shade of green, to the bay window that was covered with a thick layer of grime, and the porch where Gillian had once been left to huddle from the bitter cold of a Minnesota winter because her crazy mother had locked her out of the house.

Tessa had hoped that that particularly disturbing scene in the first book had been pure fantasy, something her mother had made up for dramatic effect. But the more details she recognized about the house, coupled with the growing churning in her belly, the more she began to suspect that nothing her mother had written had been made up - that the horrors and abuse and struggles so painfully detailed in those books had in fact been Gillian’s life.

“This - this is it, isn’t it?” she asked in a trembling voice. “The house where she was born.”

“Yes,” replied Ian gently. “I thought - well, that you’d like to see it. That you’d want to know where she grew up, perhaps find out a little more about her life. But I have to admit I didn’t expect it to be quite this bad.”

Tessa kept her hands clasped tightly in her lap, reluctant to get out of the car. “How did you locate it?” she murmured in disbelief. “And what made you decide to even start looking?”

Ian picked up her hands and rubbed them between his much larger ones to try and warm her up. “Call it an impulse, I suppose,” he sighed. “I’ve always felt badly that not only didn’t you have any real mementoes of your mother - no keepsakes or photos or possessions - but you didn’t even know anything about her family - your family. And that feeling only became stronger when I brought you home to England for Christmas. I suppose I felt guilty seeing how big and happy and loving my own family was, while you didn’t even know if you might have a grandmother or cousins of your own somewhere. So I hired an agency that specializes in researching family trees and often locating long lost relatives in the process. They sent me a report just a few weeks ago. I knew we would be in the area around this time, so I thought I would surprise you. I didn’t expect this, however. The report didn’t include any photos or details about the house or this town, simply an address.”

He waved his hand to encompass the rundown neighborhood they had parked in, and in particular the abandoned house that Gillian had once lived in.

Tessa squeezed his hand, needing both his warmth and reassurance at this point. “Thank you for doing that,” she told him somberly. “I know that your heart was in the right place, Ian. Just like it always is. Did - was there any information about my mother’s family?”

Ian nodded. “Not a great deal, though. I’ll show you the entire report, though it’s not very long. Your grandmother was widowed at a very young age, leaving her to raise your mother alone. No other family to speak of, except for a couple of distant cousins that she didn’t keep in contact with.”

“My grandmother - is she still alive?”