In seventh grade, Tessa was sent to live with the Carter family in Davie, Florida, which was a suburb of Fort Lauderdale. Glenn and Shirley Carter were in their early forties when Tessa entered their lives. Of the three families she had lived with, this one’s situation was, by far, the most promising. No trailers or shabby apartments. The Carter family home was a mansion compared to those other places. Painted a pale shade of peach, with a redbrick tile roof and a perfectly manicured lawn with a screened-in swimming pool, Tessa thought she had hit the jackpot. Briefly, she wondered if Lara had had such luck.
She didn’t recall how long she had been with the Carters when the nightmare began. Looking back, it all seemed so surreal, so off the charts. Unable to cope with the luridness that plagued her nights, she had focused her attention elsewhere.
School was her savior.
She had studied hard in school and, in her senior year of high school, earned an academic scholarship to the University of Miami, where she studied and earned her bachelor’s degree in molecular and cellular pharmacology. She had been a science nerd ever since first grade. In high school, she was a member of the National Honor Society. When she had been offered the scholarship, she knew that receiving it was her only way out of a world of poverty. It had not been easy, but she had delved into her studies and managed to graduate near the top of her class.
The day she had turned eighteen, she packed what few belongings she had and left Glenn and Shirley Carter and her former life behind. Shirley, who’d always asked the fosters to call her Mama Shirley, had truly been sad when Tessa moved out. Sure that she had not known what horrors Tessa had been subjected to, Tessa had merely said her good-byes and never looked back.
After working at Miami University Hospital for a year, she found herself getting bored and applied for a job at one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the state of Florida.
Jamison Pharmaceuticals.
It was here that she met Joel Jamison, the owner of the company, and after working in pharmaceutical sales for a year, she and Joel became involved. Ten months later, they were married, and one month after that, she was pregnant. Six weeks after learning she was pregnant, she was ecstatic when her doctor told Tessa and Joel that they were going to be the parents of identical twin girls.
At first, Joel had seemed a bit shaken at the news that they were expecting twins. She had questioned him on this later, and he’d told her the idea of raising one child was mind-boggling. Two at once, he’d said, scared the pants off him. But a few days later, once he’d gotten used to the idea, Tessa remembered he’d become even more excited as together they planned their daughters’ future.
“Twins,” she had remarked one night as they’d dined in Coral Gables at the stylish Pascal’s On Ponce. She was three months pregnant and had already gained sixteen pounds, something Joel had recently started teasing her about. He told her she looked like a starving Ethiopian. She had been truly offended. Not so much for herself but for those in Ethiopia who barely had enough food to exist. He’d apologized, but from that moment on, she was careful not to completely undress in front of him. When their waiter asked if they wanted dessert, Tessa declined, but Joel had insisted she have the key lime raspberry tart, and she remembered wondering if this was his way of telling her that he didn’t mind if she was a bit larger than some women at this stage of pregnancy. Of course, she really had no clue about relative sizes, as no one she knew had ever had twins, which led to a discussion on the topic of twins.
Identical twins.
Tessa asked Joel if there were identical twins on his side of the family. At first, Joel seemed angry at her inquiry, but then he brushed it aside, telling her he personally didn’t know of any twins but mentioning that he seemed to remember having once been told that there had been a set a few generations in the past.
Chapter 2
Tessa forced herself to think of something else, anything but the past. The cellblock was beyond noisy, and she remembered that today was Saturday, one of the two visiting days each week. She planned to finish reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby for the third time since she knew there wouldn’t be anyone anxiously waiting to visit her, to ask if she was okay, if there was anything she needed. That was not going to happen.
She had loved reading her entire life, and it was her love of books that continued to protect her sanity. Lost in the fictional world of the Brontë sisters, she devoured their stories, anything to escape her own reality. Books had been her escape as a child and would apparently be for whatever remained of her miserable life in this cell she called home.
Randall Harper, her attorney, occasionally visited when there was something new to report. He’d filed an appeal immediately after the sentencing, as was customary after one’s client had received a life sentence—in her case three of them—one for each count of murder in the first degree to run consecutively rather than, as was normal, concurrently. Randall had warned her not to expect a decision in her favor, so she wasn’t surprised when her appeal had been denied. In point of fact, she really had not cared one way or another. Her daughters were gone, her husband
