Part 1 here.
This recap will cover Chapters 17-20
Mrs. Broadfield helps Annie take a hot bath. Tony calls worriedly from the sitting room and Mrs. Broadfield explains what happened and assures him that Annie will be OK. She touches Annie inappropriately again. Creepy woman.
Annie takes a nap afterward and has a sexy dream about Luke. He ends up taking her away from Farthy on a horse as Tony watches from a window. She feels bad for leaving the shadowy figure standing behind him.
She stays in bed recuperating all day. Rye comes by later to see how she is doing. He then explains how he saw Mrs. Broadfield putting medicine in the food. Annie realizes that was no medicine.
Annie accuses Mrs. Broadfield later but the nurse plays dumb. She blames Rye and suggests Mr. Tatterton may even fire him. Annie laughs at that because Rye has been with Tony for a long time and would never fire him. She’s probably not wrong.
Later Annie tells Tony of her suspicions. He seems dubious at first but finally believes her. He assures Annie that she will be replaced immediately. Then he has Parsons bring in a big carton.
It ends up being an easel with lots of supplies. Something for Annie to do to pass the time. She isn’t sure if she will be able to paint again but promises to try. Tony tells her that Drake brought one of her paintings from home and that he has it framed in his office now.
The men in these books sure do suck at boundary issues.
When Annie asks Tony if he will call Luke, he promises to return to tell her about it afterward. She begins to draw a picture of her parent’s monument and the cemetery. Hours pass. She only stops when she realizes Tony is standing there watching. God what a creeper.
After refusing a sedative, Tony allows Annie to continue to work while he goes to do whatever he does. Annie begins to resent being told what to do. She starts feeling pressure in her feet and decides to test them. Just as she is beginning to stand, Tony returns.
Of course he gets panicked seeing her stand. That means she will soon be able to run away! He tries to tell her to take it easy but Annie is too excited to listen to him. When Tony tells Annie that Luke won’t be able to come see her because of an entrance exam, she looses her balance and falls to the floor.
She blacks out and when she regains consciousness, her doctor is there. He agrees with Tony that she needs to take things easy. After, Tony tells Annie that he has built a ramp outside so she can travel the grounds when she is ready. He begins to talk about how she can just get around whenever she wants in time but Annie tells him that she’ll be getting better soon, shattering his fantasy.
Tony turns his attention on her drawing and when he suggests she paint some of the nicer things at Farthy, Annie points out that the grounds need some work. He ignores her and talks about Jillian in present tense. He’s really beginning to lose it.
He snaps out of it and Annie realizes she is wearing a different nightgown. She is embarrassed at the thought of Tony changing her but he denies it and gets her to take a sedative.
In the morning Tony is opening her curtains as Annie awakes, being able to move her legs more than she had been able to before. He panics when she tries to get into her chair by herself, insisting that she has to rest.
Tony then helps her take a bath to her embarrassment. He even offers to scrub her back, bragging that he used to do so for her grandmother and mother. Yeah…that’s not creepy or anything.
When she sees and feels him inhaling against her neck, she snaps him out of it. He makes a comment about how much she reminds him of Leigh now and she privately regrets dying her hair, realizing it seemed to confuse Tony at times.
After breakfast, Tony returns in creased clothing and is acting weird again (big surprise). When Annie tells him that she feels stronger today and suggests they go on an outing, Tony tells her that he promises to give her a home and all that goes with it.
Annie expresses her confusion but he continues, saying one day she will be more Bostonian than he is and not to bring any of her hillbilly relatives around. As she becomes more confused, Tony snaps out of it and tells her he was in deep thought before leaving the room. Rye comes up with her tray and Annie expresses concern for Tony but he basically waves it off.
Annie goes back to painting and Drake arrives after lunch. She tells him about Mrs. Broadfield and how she can stand now. When she expresses her concern about Tony and the doctor making her rest her legs, Drake agrees with them. The subject turns toward Luke and how Drake still can’t get a hold of him.
By now Annie has had enough and asks Drake to take her to a phone so she can call Luke herself. She confesses that she doesn’t think Tony has been trying to get a hold of him. Drake sticks up for Tony of course. Annie tries to tell Drake that Tony has been getting worse, more senile each day but he won’t listen to her.
She also tries to tell him about some of the weird things Tony has been doing but Drake insists that all of her paranoid thoughts must be because of the medicine. He wants to talk to her doctor and Annie begins to wonder if he is somehow in on this too. She finally gives up on trying to talk to Drake, realizing Tony’s hold is too strong.
Drake finally promises that he will come back tomorrow and if she still feels the same, he will take her back to Winnerow. Annie tries to get Drake to take her downstairs to use the phone but he makes excuse after excuse until he leaves. Once he does, she decides she will just have to do so herself.
She manages to get downstairs to Tony’s office with the elevator chair and second wheelchair down below. Luke isn’t there when she calls but one of his dorm mates takes her frantic message. Next she goes to open the front door and when she sees the ramp, she thinks of Luke’s advice to “go for the tall ones” and takes a chance going down it.
She wheels around the grounds until she comes to the maze. After gazing at it for a few moments, someone asks if she wants to go in. The man she keeps seeing at the monument steps out of the shadows. When Annie asks who he is, he introduces himself hesitantly as Timothy Brothers. He tells her that she doesn’t have to tell him who she is and asks if her hair is her natural color or dyed like Heaven did when she was here.
Annie asks him how he knew her mother. “Timothy” tells her that he works for Tony as a toy creator and that he was Troy’s apprentice. They chat for a bit before he takes her into the maze, where they continue to talk. Annie is surprised at how knowledgeable he seems about her family–he even knows about Aunt Fanny.
When “Timothy” admits that Heaven once got lost in the maze, he ends up telling Annie the story, except of course adding that both he and Troy were in the cottage. When Annie sees the cottage, she realizes it is just like the replica her mother gave her. “Timothy” invites her inside. He acts strangely but more in a dazed way than a creepy Tony way.
They continue talking and “Timothy” gets excited when Annie confides that she stood the other day even though Tony and her doctor forbade her from doing so again. She also tells him about Luke and how she wheeled herself downstairs to call him because he hasn’t been getting her messages. She explains their relationship as basically as she can without revealing too much but “Timothy” can tell she must care about him a lot. Transparent like I said.
He becomes troubled when he learns that Annie mostly dyed her hair because Tony talked her into doing it. He asks about Tony and she tells him how strange he has been acting. When she confesses she isn’t happy at Farthy, “Timothy” tells her she should leave then.
Annie doesn’t seem to be buying his identity and asks him again who he is. He makes her promise not to tell anyone before he tells the truth–that he is Troy Tatterton. Annie doesn’t seem all that surprised and feels she had known all along.
Troy than explains how he survived his accident, leaving out all the parts with her mother. After he is finished, he urges Annie to walk. She walks into his arms and she notices that he looks like a proud father watching his daughter take her first steps. There’s definitely some irony in here.
He takes her back to the main building, pushing her up the ramp. On the way he lends her a sweater because she seems chilly. Good old helpful Troy. She kisses his cheek before she goes inside. She is on her way toward the elevator when Parsons, another handyman, and Tony enter the room and spot her. Tony is furious with her, demanding to know where she was.
She tells him that she was outside and that she took her first steps but Tony won’t hear of it. He insists she needs to be in bed, needs to take baths and have massages. He tells her that her progress will be ruined and orders Parsons to carry her upstairs.
As Annie is getting herself into bed, Tony comes in after her and compares her stubbornness to her mother’s. Annie snaps at him that her mother is dead and Tony apologizes for being so angry before. Then he sees the sweater and gets angry again, demanding to know who gave it to her. She admits a nice man who lives on the other side of the maze gave it to her and tells Tony that she is tired.
She is forced to undress in front of him before he will leave her be. Exhausted from her outing, she falls right asleep. She wakes in the middle of the night hungry. But this time her wheelchair isn’t within reach so she can’t go wandering about. She yells for Tony but he doesn’t come. She drifts back off to sleep and wakes up when she senses movement near her bed.
Tony is there in only a robe, standing there starting at her. He begins to call her Leigh. Annie keeps asking what he is talking about but he doesn’t seem to hear her. Annie babbles about missing dinner, hoping it will snap Tony out of his fantasy but this time it doesn’t work.
Then he unties his bathrobe and lets it drop to the floor.
Annie finds that the lower half of her body is numb from fear. She tries to jar Tony’s memory by crying that she is Annie, not Leigh, but his fantasy is too deep to make any difference. He keeps talking to her like it’s a weird kind of foreplay.
“We’ll make love through the night, just as we did before, and if you want, you can call me Daddy.”
He starts touching her inappropriately. She yells for him to stop, that he is about to do something awful that he will regret forever! Finally he snaps out of it. Annie tells him to get out and leave her alone as he confusedly takes in his surroundings. Finally he seems to realize what he was about to do.
Apologizing, he puts his robe back on and flees. Annie is terrified. Her wheelchair is gone so she can’t get help on her own and isn’t sure anyone else can hear her. Her door is still open, too. She stays up for as long as she can, afraid of his return.
In the morning Tony acts like last night didn’t happen. Annie tells him that she hasn’t forgotten what happened but Tony seems to think she is saying something about a dream. She demands that he brings her wheelchair back. He either pretends or doesn’t hear her as he walks out of the room.
She tries to lower herself to the floor but he returns with her tray and puts her back into bed. He makes her eat and she begins to get sleepy. He’s put a sedative in her food.
When she next wakes, she hears voices outside of her window and soon recognizes it as Luke’s. She gets out of bed and makes it to the window, calling out to him. Tony is telling Luke that Annie still can’t have visitors. Luke agrees to return the next day.
Tony finds Annie on the floor and returns her into bed, wrapping a blanket tightly around her as well as putting up guard rails on the bed. She yells at Tony for sending Luke away but he is calm, not letting her words affect him at all.
She wakes up later to the sound of voices nearby and shortly her door opens. Aunt Fanny and Luke step inside. Fanny remarks that Annie looks like she is in a crib before noting her new hair color.
Luke rushes over to her and Annie pleads with him to take her home. Tony comes in screaming about how sick Annie is. Annie tells her aunt and Luke that Tony is the one who is keeping her sick by putting stuff in her food. Fanny mentions that a man called her to come get Annie earlier. Annie realizes that she must mean Troy.
Tony begins to guilt trip Fanny, telling her that if she takes Annie that she might relapse. He goes to call the doctor while Fanny helps Annie pack. Luke and Annie begin to talk about why he has taken so long to see her. It is revealed that Tony never sent her letters. Big surprise there.
Fanny sends Luke out to the car while she helps Annie dress for the trip home. After, Fanny and Luke watch Annie use the elevator chair to get herself downstairs. Luke reveals that he is quitting summer school so he can be there for her. Rye Whiskey comes out of the kitchen to say goodbye.
Right as they turn to leave, Tony screams at them and says that the doctor is enraged. Fanny waves Luke on, muttering that Tony is crazy. Tony comes downstairs and tells them that they can’t take Annie because she’s his!
He then reveals that it is part of why Heaven left. He admits that Annie is his real granddaughter, that Heaven was his real daughter. Fanny doesn’t seem too shocked because spoiler, she knows already.
Annie puts two and two together, realizing that his fantasy with Leigh last night had been real. Tony apologizes for that, saying he was confused. Annie asks if he got confused with her mother too, and if that was the real reason she left?
Tony doesn’t know what to say to that except that it wasn’t his fault. Annie calls Tony out for all of the things he has done to her and her descendants. Tony tells her that he only did those things because he loves her and that he won’t let her go.
Luke steps forward like the prince he’s always pretended to be and stares Tony down. Tony calls for Annie, then Heaven, as Fanny and Luke wheel Annie outside and to the car. They go drive near the monument before leaving. When Annie sees Troy in the forest, she waves at him.
Next, Annie returns to Winnerow, Tony loses his battle with his madness, and Troy decides to end the secrets once and for all.
