Prologue
TARA MCBRIDE didn’t want to open the box. She really, really didn’t want to open it.
Staring down at the shoebox-size plastic container in her hand, she thought of how smug she’d been when she’d packed it fifteen years ago. Not quite fourteen then, she’d already been an overachiever, someone who was destined to become a success at whatever she chose to do.
No one—least of all herself—would have believed that two months shy of her twenty-ninth birthday, she’d be washed up. A failure.
Fired.
The word echoed eerily in her mind. Since it had only happened yesterday, she was still trying to come to terms with it.
How oddly fitting that she’d had to come home to Honoria, Georgia to attend her uncle Josiah Jr.’s funeral this morning. A funeral seemed appropriate today. The end of her uncle’s years of suffering. The end of Tara’s career.
Fired.
She hadn’t even told her family yet. She just couldn’t admit—even to those who loved her—that she had failed so miserably.
“Come on, Tara,” her twenty-six-year-old cousin Emily urged, a matching plastic box clutched in her own hands. “Open your time capsule.”
Time capsule. That was what the three cousins, Tara, Emily and Savannah McBride, had called it when they’d filled three plastic shoeboxes with mementos of their childhood, wrapped them in plastic garbage bags, stuffed them into an old cypress chest and buried them here in the woods behind Emily’s house. They’d made a solemn promise that day to dig up the chest in fifteen years and read the letters they’d written to themselves, just to find out how many of their youthful dreams had come true.
It had sounded like fun at the time. Something to fill a lazy summer afternoon. Tara thought the time capsule had been Savannah’s idea, but they’d all eagerly participated. In fact, those stupid letters had been Tara’s suggestion. She’d been so naively, arrogantly certain that her brains and ambition would take her as far up any career ladder as she wanted to go. She’d had no idea what a mess her life would be in when she found that letter again.
Now Tara wished they’d just gone to see a movie that afternoon so long ago.
Stalling, she glanced at her cousins. Savannah, only a few weeks shy of her thirtieth birthday, and still as strikingly beautiful as she’d been as a teenager, didn’t look much more enthusiastic than Tara felt about delving into the past. Only Emily looked as if she was rather enjoying this little adventure.
Tara supposed Emily would have welcomed any distraction this afternoon. It had been Emily’s father they’d buried that morning, leaving Emily alone in a house full of troubling memories.
For Emily’s sake, Tara tried to smile as she finally, reluctantly opened the box and sifted through the contents. The honors awards, the spelling-bee medals, the national test scores that had marked her as “gifted.” And that letter to herself, detailing the high-powered career she had expected to be so well established in by now.
Bleakly, she stared into the box, and realized that she’d never had a dream that hadn’t been planted in her head by the expectations of others. Now that she’d blown her chance at the impressive career. everyone had predicted for her, she hadn’t a clue what to do next Not one dream of her own to pursue.
She had never felt so lost, so alone. And, for the first time in her life, she had a great many more questions than answers.
What was she going to do now?
1
TWO WEEKS LATER, on an afternoon in early June, Tara sat alone in her expensive, beautifully decorated Atlanta apartment—an apartment befitting a young attorney on the fast track to a partnership in an old and highly respected law firm. She took no pleasure in her surroundings; had she thought about it, she would have only worried about how she was going to pay the exorbitant rent now that she had no salary.
As she had nearly every day since she’d returned from Honoria, she huddled on the couch, a soap opera playing on the TV, cartons of uneaten Chinese food scattered on the coffee table in front of her. It was a gray, cloudy aft
ernoon, but she hadn’t turned on any lights. The heavy shadows suited her mood.