"The Winters"

Lisa Gabriele is the author of Tempting Faith DiNapoli and The Almost Archer Sisters, and The Winters, and is an award-winning TV producer, writer and director. Her writing has appeared in Vice, Nerve, New York Magazine, Washington Post, New York Times Magazine, Globe and Mail, National Post, Elle and Glamour. Her essays have appeared in several anthologies, including The Best American Non-Required Reading. She’s also the author of the international best-selling S.E.C.R.E.T. trilogy, under the pseudonym L. Marie Adeline, a series that’s been published in more than 30 countries.

Gabriele applied the Page 69 Test to The Winters and reported the following:

From page 69:

…I could sense the icy road just beneath the veneer of snow and the effort the tires were making to grab and hold the curves.

It’s not a stretch to say that this line from page 69 of my new novel, The Winters, encapsulates my protagonist’s dilemma in its entirety. Right from the get-go she intuits that there is something happening below the surface of things, but she can’t quite name it, she can only feel it, like the tires navigating a snow-covered road. On this page of the book she’s finally headed to the ancestral home of Senator Max Winter, her new fiancé, located off the coast of Long Island. For now the house is still a fantasy, and she muses at the top of the page that it’s hard to believe she’ll soon be wandering its halls.

I still couldn’t anticipate getting beyond the gate—its walls and paintings, its furniture and carpets remained indistinct, blurring in my peripheral vision.

It hasn’t hit our young betrothed narrator yet all the ways in which her life is about to change. All she knows is the drive through the snowstorm is harrowing, the road treacherous, the route growing narrower and narrower.

I kept anticipating the exits, this is the turnoff, no this must be it, but Max drove on and on, oblivious to my mounting anxiety.

When she pulls her coat tighter under her chin, finally Max notices her unease. He asks her if she wants the heat up. Of course she does, but she says no, she’s fine, a harbinger for the secrets and lies that await them at the remote mansion, on an even more remote island, where the ghosts of the past have been waiting for their arrival. This page documents the drive as the hours suspended between the past and the future. Once she arrives at Asherley there is no turning back. But for now, en route, her future is vague. She senses darkness awaits her, but she has no idea how dark they’ll get before it’s over. Good thing. If she knew, she’d have thrown herself out of that moving car somewhere near Quogue.

Visit Lisa Gabriele's website.

--Marshal Zeringue