Page 2 of Tattered Edges

It’s how I, a native New Yorker, ended up in California in the first place.

I got my bachelor’s degree in art history just to piss her off.

I also minored in English, because I wasn’t completely stupid, and she wouldn’t have paid for it otherwise.

The trouble was, I spent so much time and effort trying tonotbe her, I had a hard time figuring out whoIwas.

Maeve Nielsen.

She was a best-selling contemporary American fiction author. She’d accumulated enough awards and accolades that her best novels would sit on shelves in stores around the world for decades. They’d already outlived her. She was exceptional at her craft.

It was when she died that I enrolled at Stanford to pursue my PhD in English Literature. To this day, I couldn’t say whether or not I did it as my own masochistic way of grieving, or because it was something I wanted but didn’t feel at liberty to chase so long as my mother was around to take credit for it.

After I’d earned it, I didn’t feel any closer to knowing what it was I wanted to do with my life.

Now, even though she’d been dead for six years, it felt like California was merely a pitstop and maybe, just maybe, I’d finally been gifted an opportunity to find myself somewhere far, far away.

Maeve Sawyer Nielsen.

I wasn’t ajunior, but I had been named after my mother—a woman so narcissistic, whatever fame she could claim wasn’t nearly enough. I was expected to be a reminder of her accomplishments and greatest achievements. I was a living, breathing reflection of her brilliance. Regardless of the fact that she was a well-known woman who went by her given name,she called me Maeve, too, until her dying day.

I hated being the echo of her.

Shehated that I introduced myself as Sawyer—the part of my name I believed was mine and mine alone.

It wasn’t until a few weeks after my thirty-first birthday that I learned evenSawyerwasn’t mine to claim. Not entirely.

David Johnson.

That was the lawyer’s name. The lawyer from London who showed up at Diane’s gallery two months ago looking for me. He represented the Blackstone family—specifically their businesses and financial affairs. I’d never heard of theBlackstonefamily. Neither was I aware of the Blackstone Publishing House, which had been around for an actual century; nor Tattered Edges, the family owned used-bookstore.

It was over coffee when I learned I was, in fact, a Blackstone myself.

Not only that, but I’d been bequeathed Tattered Edges and the flat above it, located on St. Andrew’s Hill.

The man who left it to me claimed to have been my father.

I knew I had one. Biologically, it took a man and a woman to create me. Except, as far as my family tree was concerned, my father’s identity wasunknown—until it wasn’t.

Sawyer William Blackstone.

Nowthiswas where things got really interesting.

Maeve Nielsen died slowly. In trueMaevefashion, before she went, she wrote one last masterpiece—or so the critics claimed. She never saw it in print. It was her editor and publisher who got it to the finish line. It was her agent who made sure to inform me it was different than anything she’d ever written.

Supposedly, it was a love letter tome.

I never read any of my mother’s novels. Neither was I brave enough to read her last. But Sawyer Blackstone read it.

At first, it seemed insane that a stranger would read my mother’s book and then come to the conclusion I was his; furthermore, for him to believe such a thing foryearswithout breathing a word of it to me, and then for him to die and leave me something so substantial was downright delusional.

Then I read the letter he wrote me when he changed his will—the letter he insisted Mr. Johnson deliver to me in person when the time came.

His unexpected death meant that time came sooner than anyone thought it would. At least, for anyone who knew him. I was so stunned by the knowledge of his existence, his death was more of an afterthought to me.

For weeks, I debated over whether or not I believed him because I wanted it to be true or because it really was.

I decided either way,hebelieved it. And while he might have been a stranger, he’d left me something important to him, and that meant something to me. I wasn’t sure exactlywhat,but I wanted to find out.

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