LN Cronan

My own theories on what each snapshot thus far signifies:  1. The word "Press" super-imposed over a fuzzy background shot of a newspaper page. A fancy pen in the foreground. Obviously in Chapter One, Gideon and Eva have a serious talk about a lot of stuff he's kept secret over the past three weeks, including how he'd used press photos of him and Corrine in public to try to fool the cops. A ploy that fail, so he and Eva need to figure out what to do next about the cops.  2. Unwrapped Christmas present boxes The morning after they reconcile, with Gideon waking up in Eva's bed. She jokes that waking up with him is like waking up to Christmas presents. See snippet # 2 http://www.sylviaday.com/2012/11/22/entwined-snippet-2/  3. The word "Business" next to a cup of coffee Eva at work, later that day, assisting her boss Mark on an advertising campaign to market flavored coffee.  4. A microphone on a stand Brett is back in New York! He's at some sort of publicity event in Times Square. I'm guessing he's about to announce "Golden" is Eva. See snippet #10, which Sylvia released one day before this snapshot: http://www.sylviaday.com/2013/03/27/entwined-snippet-10/  5. A pile of neatly-folded white terrycloth towels, wrapped in a red ribbon. Gideon and Eva together later that night, I'm guessing in a hotel room he's set up as a love nest for the pair of them.  6. A bathtub in a modern-style bathroom A serious conversation in which Gideon reveals some stuff in his past. My top guess is he talks about the role Dr. Lucas had in the sexual abuse cover-up. In the past, Gideon and Eva have had several serious conversations in a bathroom, including the one where Gideon confessed taking revenge against Dr. Lucas by sleeping with the guy's wife.

It's Tuesday! Twice-weekly snapshot will come this morning. Today will be a glimpse into Chapter 7.  Recap of 1-6:  1. The word "Press" super-imposed over a fuzzy background shot of a newspaper page. A fancy pen in the foreground. 2. Unwrapped Christmas present boxes 3. The word "Business" next to a cup of coffee 4. A microphone on a stand 5. A pile of neatly-folded white terrycloth towels, wrapped in a red ribbon. 6. A bathtub in a modern-style bathroom  Here's the link to the page on syvliaday.com where you can find links to all the snapshots as well as the book snippets. Note: whenever something new (like the snapshot to be posted this morning) goes on this page, there's a rush of traffic that temporarily overwhelms the server, making it impossible to load the page. If you can't get in immediately, try back later: http://www.sylviaday.com/category/snippet/

D'oh.  He might use the limo for nighttime business meetings too, I'm thinking, in addition to society fundraisers. But he has had Angus pick him and Eva up from work sometimes in the limo instead of his main workday car, the Bentley, so they can, um ..... I'll bet that makes Angus' eyebrows go up.  And speaking of Angus, turns out he's been working for Gideon for 8 years, I came across in Bared -- that's what Angus told Eva when she asked Angus how long he'd been working for Gideon. Gideon is 28 now, so that makes him only 20 years old when he managed to be making enough money to hire Angus away from Vidal Sr.  Interesting -- so Gideon hired Angus right around the time Gideon left college. And because Gideon was with Corrine for three years total (two dating, plus one engaged) he still would have been engaged to Corrine when he first hired Angus.

 Never. Before Eva, he'd had sex in one place and one place only - a particular hotel he started using in college, when he started sleeping with Corrine. That's the only place he'd have sex, and he'd never stay the whole night with her. It's why she dumped him after three years.  Sometime in the ensuing years, as he started amassing a fortune in real estate, he bought the hotel, and he kept a room set up there for sex, his f*** pad. He brought only casual sex partners there -- i.e. he either dated women socially (like Magdalene) and never slept with them -- or -- he slept with women but never saw them outside the hotel room.

 I'm glad Sylvia isn't wrapping up the whole Eva and Gideon saga in just three books.

It was a bit confusing, because in that part, Sylvia was actually starting to talk about Book #4. She was trying to explain why she's continuing the story past Entwined .... Gideon's got a lot more to work through and change about himself than can be accomplished in only a couple of months of knowing Eva.Â

 Yay, new member -- waving "hi" to Peachies !!!!  Other way around -- Entwined picks up right where Reflected left off, with Eva having gone running back to Gideon. Sylvia's said that for months. She also has said Entwined will cover the next two weeks in Gideon and Eva's relationship, from the time Eva went back to him.  Overall, all three books together cover a couple of months of Gideon and Eva being together. I don't have an exact number of weeks handy for each, but Reflected roughly covers a month (including the nearly three weeks they were estranged) and Bared roughly two to three weeks, including the nearly one-week Gideon spent trying to seduce Eva.

 You know you'll give in to the temptation. No way are you going to be able to keep away from Gideon that long.

Unlike the Bentley, where Angus could overhear, the back of the limo has privacy. Â Angus' eyebrows must have gone up the night of the advocacy dinner when Gideon told him to keep driving around until he (Gideon) said otherwise. But I'll bet after the concert, Angus was probably worried about what was going on back there. There was a stop for gas and change of driver in the middle of the night, and I'll bet Gideon stepped out of the limo briefly to talk to Angus. By that point, Eva had fallen into an exhausted sleep, because the next thing she remembers was Gideon waking her up Saturday morning once they arrived at the North Carolina house.

Entwined picks up immediately where Reflected left off, and Entwined will unfold over a period of two weeks. Overall, from the start of Bared to where Entwined will leave off, covers a couple of months of the relationship.  The passage below is from the newly-updated FAQ page for the Crossfire series: http://www.sylviaday.com/faq/#crossfire  Having finished Entwined with You, I can say that there are still threads that need to be tied off and a lot more work ahead for Gideon. The Crossfire series documents Gideon and Eva’s relationship day by day. Because there are no leaps forward in time, only a few months have passed in Gideon and Eva’s relationship by the end of Entwined, and only two weeks since the end of Reflected in You. There are a lot of milestones that they haven’t reached because there hasn’t been enough time elapsed.

 That's possible. Some people, who unwisely invested all their money with Geoffrey Cross would have been utterly ruined (this happened with some people in the real-life Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme). However, most of his investors wouldn't have had every cent with him, so they would have been burned but not made broke.  If Vidal Sr. took a bad financial hit around 20 years ago, it might explain why so many of his shares of Vidal Records ended up being out there for sale on the stock exchange. He'd have sold shares, chunks at a time, in return for cash to live on and then to invest elsewhere as he rebuilt an investment portfolio. Thus those shares were out there years later when bit by bit, investors who had held onto them opted to sell for various reasons -- and as shares went up for sale, Gideon bought them. I think he very patiently acquired shares out there in the marketplace until he owned more than anyone else, more than Vidal himself. This is the scenario I envision Gideon used in revenge.

 I think Elizabeth entered the marriage out of desperation, because she would have been literally left homeless and penniless in the immediate aftermath of of the Ponzi scheme being uncovered and Geoffrey killing himself. Then she almost immediately got pregnant, and the new baby became Vidal's heir and namesake. We've already figured out Elizabeth is not exactly a candidate for mother of the year. In a form of neglect, Gideon was shunted off to one side as most of her energy shifted toward pleasing her new husband and caring for the newborn.  Even under the best of circumstances, a newborn needs so much mother's attention that for a while, some of that attention given to a newborn is at the expense of the father and older children. Good fathers accept this as temporary. Poor fathers resent it. It's the basis of sibling rivalry, and even good kids feel a strain, especially in the case of a second born shifting attention away from a first born who started out life as the only child. For a troubled kid (and what happened to Gideon left him troubled) matters get only worse. Even he admitted to Eva he got worse after his half brother came along.  Rather than getting supported, Gideon got alienated. And as he pulled away, I can see his stepfather pulling further away and resenting Gideon as some brat Vidal got stuck with at the price of getting Elizabeth as a trophy wife.  Elizabeth isn't totally without feelings, but she's not been a good mother to Gideon. In the end, I think she put him last, behind her new husband and her two new children.  I can see Gideon all too willing by his late teens -- because he did move out of the house as soon as he could -- wanting to sever financial ties too, and Vidal Sr. being all too willing to let that happen, essentially telling Gideon in so many words: you're an adult, go find your own way in the world. Christopher Jr. and Ireland were Vidal's heirs, not Gideon.

Below is my educated guess based on some of the college courses I took on visual marketing plus some work related experience having worked retail jobs (mostly part time as second income). I've never worked in book retailing, but I imagine the same sorts of things that apply in how other things are set up to catch the competing attention of shoppers.  Some of the international covers, I think, are more generic romance-genre covers in order to entice romance fiction fans in those countries to pick up a Crossfire book from among other books on the shelf -- readers who are not yet fans of Sylvia herself but who would be drawn by a pretty cover that appeals to a wider general audience.  Sylvia is gaining a reputation in other parts of the world, but presently it's in the United States and Canada where she's now become such a name that her name alone on the cover is enough to prompt a reader to pick up the book (and for the bookstores to place her books near the front of the store, where they have the best shot at being seen by shoppers.)  Book covers are meant to entice shoppers to pick up a volume. The next natural thing is to read the description (on the back cover for softcover and the inside front dust jacket for hardcover). Now that the shopper is holding a book and the description interests him/her comes the tipping point: do I buy this book? When a book is in a section of the store (here, the romance section) it's the picture that needs to tempt the reader. At the front of the store, it's the author name.  General principles of all retail in-store marketing is to get shoppers to handle the merchandise. The mere act of holding something increases the desire to consider owning it. General principle of all visual marketing (advertisements -- and the cover of a book is an ad for the book itself) is to catch the eye of as wide an audience as possible, especially new audiences.

I think Gideon inherited his genius for making money from his father, but where his father misused that talent to become a very serious crook, Gideon has used his to be an honest businessman -- and ended up richer than his father could have ever become as a crook. Geoffrey Cross probably dreamed of the success Gideon achieved, but Geoffrey chose the fast, dishonest way to try to get there. However, when Gideon was younger, he had started out in life as a young man by first tapping into his own dishonest side. Gideon got his start by cheating at blackjack (counting cards.) Those gambling winnings became the foundation upon which he eventually built his financial empire. It had been in the casinos while gambling that he started making honest business connections through folks he met at the gaming tables. He turned to honest ways of making money, and now he is scrupulous today about being an honest businessman. I think this demonstrates how Gideon is very much a complicated person full of both dark and light, and that in the end, the light prevails. Plus, I cut him lots of slack for having started out cheating at blackjack in order to get money. I'll be that the only reason his stepfather paid for him to go an Ivy League college (Columbia University) was because it made his stepfather look good. Gideon left home as soon as he could and already was distancing himself from the Vidals. It's safe to say Vidal had no intention of continuing to keep Gideon in an affluent position in life past college age -- and I'll bet Gideon would have refused to continue to accept money from the Vidals in any case.

 It would have never worked out between the two of them four years ago, because Eva was still too broken at the time. This was before her father, knowing something was wrong with her (though in the dark about why) persuaded her to enter therapy.  She started seeing Dr. Travis, continuing to do so for the next four years, up to the time she moved to New York. Therapy helped repair much of the damage Nathan inflicted. She stopped believing sex was the only way to connect with guys. A "recovering s**t" is how she described herself to Gideon, during their North Carolina trip when she compared how she had been back in the Brett days versus the woman she is now.  Back then, the whole connection she had with Brett on her side was because the situation was set up for her to degrade herself, which at the time was the only way she knew, a truly dysfunctional way. Meanwhile, he was too wrapped up in the promiscuity his lifestyle made possible.  In the end, even she recognized that f****** him in a bathroom stall between sets at a concert was degrading. The last straw, which prompted her to disappear from his life via one of her "runners" was overhearing him laughing about her to the band's drummer.  What about all these years later -- him gotten screwing around out of his system and settled down, and dreaming that some day Eva would come back into his life, approaching him at a concert? It still would not have worked out, because she still had serious issues, the worst being her insecurity/jealousy problem. Those issues had been her major problem on her side of the relationship with Gideon -- her role in the reason the relationship was so rocky. Because she loved Gideon, she ended up facing those demons on her own in the end -- facing them, oddly enough, after she'd dumped Gideon.  She'd have never gotten that far in personal growth if Gideon hadn't been in her life at the time Brett's life path and her life path crossed again when they had today. As it was, the Gideon relationship reached a fork in the road where it could have easily broken her for good instead of making her grow. By the time things had really gotten bad with Gideon (when Gideon deliberately pushed her away by hurting her) Cary had been scared the Gideon relationship had the potential to eff her up permanently. It didn't, in the end.

My guess is suicide, because the guy was going to prison. Ponzi schemes are about as ugly as financial crimes come, and on the size Geoffrey Cross operated, a lot of very rich people would have been burned badly.  However, poor Gideon suffered as a kid even though his mother remarried right away and they moved out of New York City. From page 319 of Reflected:  I never knew when I'd run across someone my dad had f***** over, and I took a lot of s*** for it from other kids. From their parents. Teachers. it was big news. To this day, people still talk about my dad and what he did. I was so angry. At everyone. I had tantrums all the time. I broke things.  What bothers me is the poor kid was left with his last name, Cross, when it would have been kind under the circumstances to change his last name to Vidal, given the notoriety and the fact his biological father was dead. Especially because Gideon was so young; it wouldn't have been unusual for a stepfather to adopt a stepson. But Elizabeth Vidal had gotten pregnant right away, and the baby on the way was a boy, so I guess Christopher Sr. felt like only his biological son deserved the family name. Jerk.

 I've also wondered about his father's suicide too -- Gideon already was an angry kid with issues even before the sexual assault.  Geoffrey Cross shot himself in the head. Suicide using that method is often done at home, where firearms are stored. Gideon was five years old at the time, which made him pre-school age. It's possible he heard the shot, and if he ran to investigate, may have see the body.  I also wonder whether an argument between Gideon's parents immediately preceded the suicide. Near the end of Reflected, when Gideon told Eva some pieces about his troubled past, he described how things in the house had suddenly changed from happy to his parents yelling & screaming daily.

 Generally, no - a person cannot be forced to testify against his/her spouse, though it's not an absolute blanket of immunity. Under some circumstances, a prosecutor can try to seek to force testimony about knowledge of stuff prior to the marriage. That's a gray area. It is one of the "outs" Gideon has, to marry Eva in order to make it almost impossible for the cops to try use her anymore as bait in their trap.

 I think the thing that's stopping him from pulling the plug right now is the fact his sister, Ireland, still lives at home. If he were to ruin his stepfather, the Vidal mansion would go. But Ireland is 17 years old. Very soon, she'll be college age, and a few years after that naturally wanting to live independently as a young woman. Gideon could make sure she never wants for money or a place to live -- but I bet he'd be glad to see the Vidal mansion go, given the horror he endured under that roof.

At least she'll have the Crossfire #4 story somewhat mapped out, which is something. But if she's hard at work right now on a novel due out in August with another one already announced for November, then we're likely looking at a 2014 release for the 4th Crossfire. Â Well, it'll be worth the wait, however long, if it gives us more Eva and Gideon beyond Entwined.

Another Foreigner tune: Waiting For A Girl Like You

 Eva's apartment is modern style, and her bathroom is set up with separate shower and tub. Another possibility is this is a tub in a hotel room.  Snapshot #5, which came out Tuesday, showed a neat pile of white terrycloth towels, and some of the speculation here was they were meeting in a hotel. This might fit in with the luggage tags on the bookcover.

Sylvia already has another novel coming out in August, so it's very unlikely the publisher would release the 4th Crossfire novel that same month. Sales of each book could compete with one another.  Especially because the new book is the first of two volumes in a new contemporary series - we're going to meet new modern-day characters. It's called Afterburn, and it's due out Aug. 15. The second novel, Aftershock, is due out Nov. 12.  Here's the link to the Coming Soon page on Sylvia's main website, http://www.sylviaday.com/coming-soon/

A second possibility might be a frank conversation about Corrine, because the original conversation Gideon had with Eva about his ex took place in Eva's bathroom. Â That was the night Eva got blindsided by Corrine's existence and ended up walking out of the fundraising dinner. Gideon chased her home, arriving quickly on her heels while she was standing in the living room dealing with the orgy Cary had going and she'd interrupted by coming home early. Â She continued to turn her back on Gideon, going to her room to remove her party dress and then climbed into the shower to hide there in misery. Gideon followed her, and though she repeatedly tried ordering him to just leave, he stayed and insisted on making her listen to him. That's when he told her about the past relationship with Corrine -- and about the recent past too: Corrine leaving her husband and leaning on Gideon as a friend. Â That conversation ended with Eva telling him he needed to nip Corrine's hopes in the bud and start weaning her off. Perhaps this bathroom conversation in Chapter Six of Entwined is will cover how Gideon plans to do just that, perhaps already has cut off Corrine. Â If that's true, then it might indicate the cops/prosecutor have begun backing down -- so Gideon no longer needs to use Corrine as part of his cover plan to stop the police from establishing his motive to kill Nathan. Â Lots of fans have hoped the whole murder investigation will go away early in Entwined. Maybe that's the case.

The snapshot shows a bathtub. The small section of the bathroom we see shows black and white tiles and looks upscale. Â My read into this: serious conversation between Eva and Gideon with Gideon opening up. Repeatedly in the series, some of the more frank conversations Gideon has had with Eva have taken place while the two of them are sitting in the tub together -- conversations in which Gideon has opened up just a little bit. Â And I'm guessing based on one of those past tub-conversations, which dealt with Dr. Lucas, this might be the chapter in which we find out exactly what role Lucas, a pediatrician, probably played in the cover-up of the sexual abuse Gideon suffered. Â During that particular past conversation, which took place during the weekend in North Carolina, Gideon confessed to Eva that he slept with Dr. Lucas' wife in order to hurt Lucas. Gideon was pretty ashamed of what he'd done: originally planned it as a one night stand, but let her keep coming back for seconds until she was prepared to leave her husband. That's when Gideon cut her off and sent her back to Lucas. Gideon later said that no matter how long he showered after being with Anne Lucas, he never felt clean.