Rabbit Hole
Theodora “Teddy” Angstrom, a high school teacher dealing with the mysterious vanishing of her sister, Angie, ten years ago, is dealt another blow when her father drives his car off of a bridge on the anniversary of her disappearance.
She is, at this point, the last in a long line of the socially elite Angstrom family, only now irreparably tarnished by her father’s affair and desertion of his family to marry Teddy’s mother, a loss of money, and cratering social status.
This is how dire it is.
“I discover in my digging that Dad gave up around Christmas,” says Teddy. “The bills have been past due for months. The cable company gives me a hard time clearing the balance because my name is not on the account. Mom's name is not even on the account. They finally let up when I explain that the account holder can't come to the phone because he launched himself to the bottom of a river. I use my own savings to take care of the remainder.”
Teddy is left to take care of her mother, a spendthrift who refuses to deal with the fact they have no money except for her teacher’s salary and to unwind exactly what her father was up to before he died.
Besides that, she’s embarked on a love affair with the family’s former gardener, has to teach her students while she’s becoming emotionally undone, and finds herself being drawn into the Reddit discussions about what happened to her sister. She is, indeed, descending into a rabbit hole, one that has her chasing phantoms, making friends with people who are just as unstable as she is, and attempting to determine if her father was a bad guy or just someone so overcome with grief he couldn’t go on.
As if that isn’t enough to manage, Teddy’s dog, the one the family got as a puppy before Angie suddenly disappeared one night, is pitifully dying. It’s enough to drive anyone into a downward spiral, and that’s where Teddy finds herself as she learns that she can’t trust anyone to tell her the truth. And so, it’s left for Teddy to be strong enough to determine what happened to both her father and sister—and to live with the truth.