“Supposedly he lives with her,” Hannah shout-whispered. “Supposedly she moved in with him after, like, two months. Supposedly she’s totally normal, nothing special. Bee googled her and apparently she looks…regular. Not a supermodel or anything. But maybe Bee is just lying to me to keep me sane. She’s probably perfect.”

“Have you googled her?” Vicki asked, afraid of the answer.

“I can’t,” Hannah said sheepishly. “Bee won’t tell me her last name. I tried googling ‘Tom Keating’ and ‘Jaime’ and ‘guidance counselor,’ but nothing came up.”

“That’s probably for the best, Hannah. In this case, the Internet is not your friend.”

Vicki had spoken to Hannah a few times after that, to confirm the details of their trip. Hannah would arrive three days ahead of Vicki to do bridesmaid duties. She would stay with the other bridesmaids in a hotel suite in the Governor Calvert House until the night of the wedding, when she’d switch over to share the room next door at the Robert Johnson House with Vicki.

Now, with just two hours until the ceremony, Vicki guessed that Hannah was already at the country club waiting for guests to arrive. With the lamp still on and the remote control back in its place by the bed, Vicki reached over to her purse and pulled out a paperback book, My Sweet Audrina.

Vicki had not told anyone—not even Dr. Howard—that when her depression became unbearable about a year ago, she began buying V. C. Andrews’s books at the Barnes & Noble down the street from her apartment complex. She didn’t think Dr. Howard would object to her reading smut; it was just that she was too embarrassed to tell him about it.

They were the same steamy novels Vicki had read as a kid, after finding her mother’s secret stash in her family’s basement closet. There had been about twenty-five of the books in her mother’s collection back then, some by Andrews, others by authors of a similar bent. When Vicki found the paperbacks as a thirteen-year-old, she’d been mesmerized. It was grown-up erotica. She couldn’t believe the way the authors discussed sex so vividly, the way they described organs with unsubtle euphemisms and explained the dramatic, life-changing ecstasy that was sexual intercourse.

It was because of those books that Vicki was supremely disappointed when she finally had sex for the first time as a senior in high school.

V. C. Andrews had led her to believe that a woman could quite literally feel a man’s orgasm. She remembered reading phrases like “she felt him come inside of her,” and had assumed that penises were something like fire hydrants. Once levers were released, they would spray with force. She imagined that whatever came out of penises at the point of ecstasy coated the inside of a woman’s vagina with something soft and nice, like movie-popcorn butter. Vicki couldn’t wait to feel it.

And there was always clawing. In V. C. Andrews’s world, people always clawed during sex, marking each other’s bodies with scratches and bruises. It was never about violence. It was about uncontrollable passion. Sometimes the sex involved incest. Vicki would never admit it, but she’d liked those scenes best. It was taboo on top of taboo. Sibling rape. Cousin love. Beautiful twins who slept with the same man.